Facts We Just Learned About Christopher Walken That Made Us Say 'Whoa'
Christopher Walken has been in show business for just about his entire life. No, literally - his first photo shoot was at the age of 14 months. His career really took off in the late 1970s, when he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in The Deer Hunter.
Since then, Walken's filmography has primarily featured odd or dangerous roles - men on the edge. However, based on his interviews and public appearances, his actual persona is anything but wild. He enjoys living in the country with his wife of more than 50 years, and owns neither a computer nor a cell phone. The following are a selection of facts about actor Christopher Walken. Vote up the ones that genuinely surprise you.
- Photo: Next Stop, Greenwich Village / 20th Century Fox1544 VOTES
His Real Name Is Ronald
Christopher Walken was born Ronald Walken, and is still known as "Ronnie" by his family and childhood friends.
The name "Christopher" was bestowed on Walken by Monique van Vooren, a Belgian cabaret singer, seemingly on a whim. Walken told the Tulsa World that, early in his career, he served as one of her backup dancers. As the story goes:
One night, before introducing him to the audience, [van Vooren] turned to him and said: "You know, Ronnie is OK. But I think tonight I call you Christopher. I like Christopher," and with that he was christened with his stage name.
"I just said, 'Cool!' " [Walken] recalled... "She was so gorgeous. Really hot, let's face it, that's the word," he said. "She had that European thing."
- Photo: Star Wars / 20th Century Fox2750 VOTES
To hear Chris Walken tell it, he was simply one among many actors who auditioned - or were considered - for the role of Han Solo in the original Star Wars. Yet, according to the book How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, Walken was George Lucas's second choice for the role.
The director was initially reluctant to cast Harrison Ford, because he'd already used him in his previous film, American Graffiti. Allegedly, even after Lucas cast Ford as the charming space smuggler, he was still considering giving the part to Walken.
- Photo: CBS Television / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Walken has idolized Elvis Presley for most of his life. He even styles his hair (which he takes great pride in) after the late rock and roll icon. He told biographer Robert Schnakenberg, "The minute I saw him, I started combing my hair that way."
Written by and starring Walken, Him debuted off-Broadway in 1994. It begins with Elvis trapped in limbo with his stillborn twin brother, and ends with him undergoing a sex change operation and becoming a waitress at a truckstop. It was not well received.
Most critics dismissed the play, with the New York Times calling it "woozily conceived." Walken accepts the criticism, and admits in the Schnakenberg biography:
It was the hardest thing I ever did, because it wasn't very good. It was very, very whimsical. It really depended on what kind of mood I was in when I did it. If I was feeling silly enough, and brave enough, outrageous enough, it usually worked okay. That was usually on a weekend. Again, it had to do with the audience. There was something very silly about it that I think the audience had to share with you.
- Photo: Gibson & Co. / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain4969 VOTES
Growing up, Walken worked many different jobs to earn a living - the wildest of which has to be the summer he spent taming lions. According to Walken, he applied for the job when he was 16 - after picking it out of a trade paper. As he told Vanity Fair in 2012,
It was a touring circus that was owned by a man named Terrell Jacobs. It was just one big tent, and he was a lion tamer. He didn’t have any kids, but the bit was that I would dress up as his son in an identical outfit. When he would finish his act, there would be one lion left, and I used to go in and have this lion do tricks. It was a female named Sheba, and she was very sweet. Like a dog, really. I would wave the whip, and she would run and sit up and roll over and do things.
Walken likes to clarify that he wasn't really "taming" anyone; he just ended the show with a very well-trained lion. "Sheba. Old girl. Very nice," he says. "She’d come and bump your leg. Like a house cat."
- Photo: Batman Returns / Warner Bros.5755 VOTES
He Steals His Clothes From Movie Sets
In a 2010 interview with the Independent, Christopher Walken freely admitted to swiping his clothes from movie sets. In fact, he showed up to the interview wearing a suit jacket from his 1990 film The Comfort of Strangers. Allegedly, he's been doing this for years.
"I never buy clothes," Walken says in the interview. "Whenever I do a movie, all my clothing is from that movie set. They don't give me anything. I steal..."
Walken intended to take a handful of garments from the set of Batman Returns when he finished filming his scenes. Unfortunately for the actor, the crew was one step ahead of him. As he explains, "When I finished the last scene I went back to my dressing room and everything was gone. They saw me coming..."
- Photo: Brainstorm / MGM/UA Entertainment Company6870 VOTES
He Doesn't Own A Computer Or Cell Phone
In multiple interviews, Christopher Walken has mentioned that he owns neither a computer nor a mobile phone. He's also never sent an email, never texted, and never been on Twitter.
"Sometimes on a movie they'll give me a cell phone, but it's more so that they can find me... like a tracking collar," Walken told Late Show host Stephen Colbert in December 2020. "If I want to use it, someone has to dial it for me, that kind of thing."
Walken and Colbert spoke during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so the interview had to be conducted via Zoom. Walken explained that someone had to come to his house to set up the digital connection.
- Photo: Sleepy Hollow / Paramount Pictures7383 VOTES
He Doesn't Get Along With Horses
Walken admits that he's a terrible horse rider. In 2016, he told the Guardian,
The times I’ve had to be on a horse, I’ve always been told, "You’ve got to take control of the horse. The horse can feel your authority." Forget about it. The horse had no respect for me. They always run away with me.
When he was filming Heaven's Gate, Walken had to ride a horse nearly every day for eight months. In all that time, he says, "The horse never got to like me." Later, when he played the James Bond villain Max Zorin, the scenes of him racing on a horse were achieved by setting the actor on a stuffed horse that was towed behind a truck.
Walken used a similar device in 1999's Sleepy Hollow, when he played the headless horseman. According to biographer Robert Schnakenberg,
Walken informed producers of his equinophobia and requested that they provide him with a mechanical mount for his galloping scenes. Luckily the prop horse used by Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet was still in mothballs, so that's the adorable Piebald you see Walken riding...
Two years before he appeared in The Prophecy as the vengeful angel Gabriel, Christopher Walken played another, friendlier angel in Madonna's "Bad Girl" music video. This was the fourth and final collaboration between Madonna and director David Fincher, and portrays Madonna as a high-powered executive (named Louise Oriole) who falls into a depression spiral of various addictions.
Some descriptions of the video claim Walken is Madonna's guardian angel, but the Independent's Ben White makes a strong case for Walken being the Angel of Death.
Walken met Madonna through Sean Penn, his co-star on the film At Close Range. He told Rolling Stone,
They were engaged to be married, so she was around sometimes. Not long after that she asked me to be in the music video. Actually, it was through Sean. [...] I like her very much. She’s very strong and interesting. On set, she’s formidable but nice.
- Photo: Sleepy Hollow / Paramount Pictures9562 VOTES
His Distinctive Way Of Speaking Comes From Being Raised By Immigrants
Walken has been asked many times where his distinctive speech pattern comes from. He credits his upbringing in Queens, NY, in the 1940s and '50s. He told Vanity Fair,
Well, I come from a part of New York that was almost entirely immigrants. I was born in America but all of my friends’ parents, everybody’s parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe. Many people in my neighborhood hardly bothered to learn English. They just came to America and lived in a community where they just spoke their old language, whether it was Italian or German or Polish. They just lived their lives like they were almost still in Europe. I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.
Walken's mother, Rosalie, was from Glasgow, Scotland, and his father, Paul, was from Germany. In 1931, Paul opened his first bakery at 29-13 Broadway in Astoria. This bakery later relocated, and the Walken Cafe opened at its old location.
- Photo: Hairspray / New Line Cinema10558 VOTES
He Dislikes Traveling And Prefers To Stay Home
When it comes to celebrities, it often seems like they live in one of two cities: Los Angeles or New York. Christopher Walken lives in rural Connecticut, and he prefers it that way.
"I live in the Connecticut countryside [with his wife Georgianne], and I rarely go out," he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "I sometimes go for weeks without seeing anybody."
Walken likes to consider himself a regular guy, eschewing Hollywood openings and parties. "I make an effort to keep a distance from the whole social thing," he said in 2012. "I try to live in a calm way."
Walken dislikes air travel, and even missed out on a screening of 2012's Seven Psychopaths because he didn't want to fly to London. "I don't much like driving either. I prefer to be driven," he told the Observer.
- Photo: Next Stop, Greenwich Village / 20th Century Fox11482 VOTES
Walken's Mother Got Him His First Acting Jobs
Christopher Walken was born in 1943 to first-generation immigrants. While Walken describes his father as rather reserved, his mother passionately wanted her sons to be involved in the arts. As the Guardian reports,
It was his mother who enrolled Walken and his two brothers in dance class, dragged them into the city and put them up for parts in live TV shows. “They used a lot of kids. All the programmes were very family-oriented. My mother knew that, and we’d get on the train and go to Manhattan.” I assume he was too young to be scared?
“Oh no, I was terrified!” Walken grows suddenly animated. “If I was given a line, I would usually forget it.”
Walken performed on many television shows in his youth, played the narrator in 1953's The Wonderful John Acton, and appeared in the soap opera Guiding Light from 1954 to 1956.
- Photo: King of New York / Seven Arts12554 VOTES
He Hates Guns
Christopher Walken is no fan of firearms. He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
I've done it a lot [used firearms] in movies, but there are too many guns in the real world. I know people with guns, and they always say the same thing. “If somebody breaks into my house, I have to be able to defend myself.” But what they're really saying is, “I hope somebody breaks into my house so I can use this thing.” It's so wrong.... Guns are out of control. Soon we won't be able to go to movie theaters without passing through a metal detector.
- Photo: Envy / DreamWorks Pictures13280 VOTES
He Hates It When Filmmakers Try To 'Walkenize' Roles He's Offered
Christopher Walken's mannerisms and pronunciations create a distinct persona on screen. That's led some filmmakers to try to write parts specifically for the actor, and that really irritates him. He told the New York Times,
Sometimes I’ll take a part, and they’ll hire me and then they’ll rewrite it. They Walkenize it — they make it more off the wall, more eccentric.
When asked if he found that flattering, Walken responded, "No, it’s very annoying! Now I have it in my contract that if you give me the part and you change it, it’s gotta be OK with me."
The actor explains in another interview that this "Walkenizing" will sometimes ruin his entire interest in a part. "They turn it into what they perceive my personality to be. I prefer it when they leave the script alone and let me work it out," he says.
- Video: YouTube
14469 VOTESHe's A Trained Dancer
By this point, Christopher Walken dancing is practically its own meme, but it bears mentioning: The man knows his stuff.
Walken told Interview Magazine that it was "very typical" for working-class people in his neighborhood to enroll their kids in dancing school. He started when he was three. As he grew up, he took dance lessons with Danny Daniels, who won a Tony for his choreography in 1983's The Tap Dance Kid.
Walken appeared in the off Broadway revival of Best Foot Forward with a young Liza Minelli. On working with Walken, she later recalled, “I’d been around dancers my whole life, having watched my parents make musicals at MGM, and Chris reminded me of so many of the dancers I knew growing up. He’s talented in every way.”
Walken performed as a backup dancer for a Belgian cabaret singer, played Riff in West Side Story, and has cut a rug in a number of films.
And, of course, he starred in Fatboy Slim's music video for "Weapon of Choice."
- Photo: Brainstorm / MGM/UA Entertainment Company
On November 28, 1981, Christopher Walken sailed to Catalina with actress Natalie Wood and her husband Robert Wagner aboard their yacht, the Splendour. Joining them was the ship's captain, Dennis Davern. Walken and Wood were in the midst of filming Brainstorm - which would end up being Wood's final picture.
That night, Walken and Wagner got into an argument, and Wood left. Wagner assumed she'd taken the yacht's dinghy out on the water. When she did not return, he called the Harbor Patrol. Wood was found floating in the water at 8 am the next morning, drowned.
Rumors about what happened that night have persisted ever since, and Walken dislikes talking about it. In 1986, he told People, "I don’t know what happened. She slipped and fell in the water. I was in bed then. It was a terrible thing.”
In 1997, Walken opened up a bit more. He told Playboy,
What happened that night only she knows, because she was alone. She had gone to bed before us, and her room was at the back. A dinghy was bouncing against the side of the boat, and I think she went out to move it. There was a ski ramp that was partially in the water. It was slippery – I had walked on it myself. She had told me she couldn’t swim; in fact, they had to cut a swimming scene from Brainstorm. She was probably half asleep, and she was wearing a coat.
The actor knows this explanation will do nothing to dispel the mystery, however. As he puts it,
The people who are convinced that there was something more to it than what came out in the investigation will never be satisfied with the truth. Because the truth is, there is nothing more to it.
