Christopher Walken

• 1. Introduction

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  Christopher Walken was born Ronald Walken on the 31st of March 1943, in Astoria, Queens, New York City. His parents were Rosalie Russell, a Scottish immigrant from Greenock, and Paul Walken, a German immigrant from Gelsenkirchen who ran a bakery in Astoria. He was named after actor Ronald Colman. A child television actor in the 1950s, a Shakespeare-trained stage performer, a James Bond villain, an Oscar winner, a Fatboy Slim video legend, and the man behind one of the most quoted phrases in sketch comedy history. How does one person do all of that? The answer lies in a career that spans more than seven decades, a refusal to turn down almost any role, and a speaking voice so singular that a stage show was built entirely around people attempting to imitate it.

• 2. Astoria Roots

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  Rosalie Russell, Walken's mother, carried her dreams of stardom into her sons' childhoods. She pushed Ronald, Kenneth, and Glenn into television work during the Golden Age of Television, and all three became child actors. Walken appeared in anthology series and variety shows as an extra, and a sketch with Martin and Lewis on The Colgate Comedy Hour confirmed his ambitions. He landed a regular role in the 1953 television show Wonderful John Acton as Kevin Acton, credited then as Ronnie Walken.

  From 1954 to 1956, Walken and his brother Glenn originated the role of Michael Bauer on the soap opera The Guiding Light. It was a remarkable run for someone still in his early teens. Then, when he was 15, a girlfriend showed him a magazine photo of Elvis Presley. Walken later described the encounter plainly: "This guy looked like a Greek god. Then I saw him on television. I loved everything about him." He changed his hairstyle to match Presley's and has not changed it since. As a teenager, he also briefly worked for a lion tamer in a circus.

  He attended Hofstra University but left after one year after being cast as Clayton Dutch Miller in an off-Broadway revival of Best Foot Forward alongside Liza Minnelli. Before shifting to dramatic roles, he trained as a dancer at the Washington Dance Studio. In 1964, he changed his first name to Christopher at the suggestion of Monique van Vooren, who employed him as a dancer in her nightclub act and believed the name suited him better than Ronnie. He prefers to be called Chris.

• 3. Breakthrough in Vietnam

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  Michael Cimino's 1978 film The Deer Hunter gave Walken the role that changed everything. He played Nick Chevotarevich, a Pennsylvania steelworker emotionally destroyed by the Vietnam War. To achieve the gaunt physical appearance the third act required, Walken consumed only bananas, water, and rice for a month. The performance earned him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

  The path to that role had been gradual. Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes in 1971, with Sean Connery and Dyan Cannon, was his first major studio film. Woody Allen's Annie Hall in 1977 cast him as Duane, the borderline-crazy brother of Diane Keaton's character. His surname was misspelled as "Wlaken" in the end credits. Along the way, George Lucas considered Walken for the part of Han Solo in Star Wars alongside Nick Nolte and Burt Reynolds; Harrison Ford got the role. These near-misses and supporting parts built the quiet credibility that The Deer Hunter then detonated into something lasting.

  His Oscar-winning performance was later ranked the 88th greatest film performance of all time by Premiere magazine. And his work in Herbert Ross's 1981 musical Pennies from Heaven, where he surprised critics with an intricate tap-dancing striptease, made Entertainment Weekly's list of the hundred greatest performances that should have won Oscars but didn't.

• 4. Villains and Variety

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  In 1985, Walken dyed his hair blond to play Max Zorin, a James Bond villain whose origins the film traces to Nazi experimentation, in A View to a Kill. It was Roger Moore's final appearance as Bond. The following year, At Close Range cast Walken as Brad Whitewood, a rural Pennsylvania crime boss whose character was mostly based on real criminal Bruce Johnston.

  Roger Ebert, particularly impressed by Walken's villain and anti-hero portrayals, once stated that "when he is given the right role, there is nobody to touch him for his chilling ability to move between easy charm and pure evil." Ebert called him "one of the few undeniably charismatic male villains."

  But Walken's range frustrated easy categorization. He played a Bond villain and then a psychic schoolteacher in David Cronenberg's 1983 adaptation of Stephen King's The Dead Zone. He played a drug dealer in King of New York, a villain industrialist in Batman Returns, and then appeared in Madonna's 1993 music video for "Bad Girl," directed by David Fincher. Quentin Tarantino later declared that Walken's involvement in the "Sicilian scene" of True Romance was one of the proudest moments in his career. The only role Walken turned down of note, according to director Abel Ferrara, was Ray Ruby in Go Go Tales, originally written for him; it went instead to Willem Dafoe.

  Walken has stated in interviews that he will decline a role only if he is too busy to accept. He regards each role as a learning experience. His films have grossed more than $1.6 billion in the United States.

• 5. The Fatboy Slim Video

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  In 2001, Walken appeared in a music video for Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice," directed by Spike Jonze. He dances and flies around the lobby of the Marriott Hotel in Los Angeles, and he also helped choreograph the dance. The video won six MTV awards in 2001. In April 2002, a survey of musicians, directors, and music industry figures conducted by UK music television channel VH1 named it Best Video of All Time in a list of the top 100 videos of all time.

  The video tapped something that had always been present in Walken's career but rarely highlighted: his formal dance training. He had spent years at the Washington Dance Studio before turning to dramatic roles, had surprised audiences with tap dancing in Pennies from Heaven, performed the tango in A Business Affair, and later appeared in a singing-and-dancing duet with John Travolta in the 2007 film adaptation of Hairspray. The Fatboy Slim video made the dancing impossible to ignore.

• 6. Saturday Night Live

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  Walken hosted Saturday Night Live seven times, generating a body of sketch work that has outlasted nearly all of it. The most famous sketch was a spoof of Behind the Music featuring a recording session of Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) the Reaper." Walken played record producer Bruce Dickinson, a character obsessed with getting "more cowbell" into the song, making passionate and slightly unhinged speeches to the band. The phrase "I gotta have more cowbell" was adapted onto merchandise. The real producer who suggested cowbell on the original recording was David Lucas.

  For years Walken also appeared in a recurring sketch called "The Continental," in which he played a chivalrous but deeply strange bachelor whose advances inevitably failed. Only the hand of his neighbor was ever shown on screen. The sketch ran until 2003. The 5th of April 2008 episode was the first Walken-hosted show without a Continental sketch or a monologue in which he sang and danced; instead the episode featured "Walken Family Reunion," where Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis, Andy Samberg, Amy Poehler, Fred Armisen, Darrell Hammond, and Kenan Thompson all played fictional Walken relatives sporting his trademark pompadour.

  In September 2004, Lionsgate released a DVD titled The Best of Christopher Walken through SNL's archive. Walken returned to the show on the 28th of October 2023, appearing as the "Spirit of Halloween" in a cameo opposite Mikey Day's President Joe Biden. During a 2003 episode, Dave Grohl pranked Walken into placing emphasis on "Fighters" rather than "Foo" when introducing the band; the clip became an internet meme, and Walken pronounced the name correctly in 2023.

• 7. Stage and the Written Word

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  Walken played King Philip of France in the 1966 Broadway premiere of The Lion in Winter. Two years later, he played Lysander and Romeo at the Stratford Festival in Canada. He went on to play the lead in Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Coriolanus.

  In 1975, he starred with Irene Worth in a Broadway revival of Sweet Bird of Youth. His most decorated stage work came in 2000 when he was cast as the lead alongside Blair Brown in James Joyce's The Dead on Broadway. The production ran for 24 previews and 120 performances, featured music by Shaun Davey, and won the Tony Award for Best Book for a Musical. Walken received a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Musical for his performance.

  He also wrote a play. In 1995, Him premiered at the New York Shakespeare Festival. The play, which Walken wrote and performed in, imagines his idol Elvis Presley in the afterlife; the conceit involves Presley faking his death, fleeing to Morocco, and undergoing a sex change. The New York Times offered a somewhat positive review, describing it as a "woozily conceived, fantastical new play" and praising the "sharpness and wit of writing and in the performances." Walken received a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Play for Martin McDonagh's A Behanding in Spokane in 2010, the same playwright he reunited with for Seven Psychopaths in 2012.

• 8. Voice, Legacy, Influence

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  Walken traces his distinctive speech to growing up in Astoria surrounded by immigrant neighbors. "The neighborhood itself, you didn't hear a lot of English," he has said. "Lots of Greek, Italian, Polish, German, Yiddish. I think I grew up listening to people who spoke English in a kind of broken way. I think maybe I talked that way." His voice has been compared to William Shatner and Garrison Keillor as examples of voices that create a pleasing or at least entertaining aural experience. In 2006, actor and comedian Patrick O'Sullivan created a stage show in Hollywood called All About Walken: The Impersonators of Christopher Walken.

  Benicio del Toro cited Walken as an influence and said the best acting advice he had ever received came from him: "When you're in a scene and you don't know what you're gonna do, don't do anything." Kat Dennings called him her favorite actor and credited him as the reason she wanted to become an actress. Johnny Depp said one of his main reasons for starring in Nick of Time was the opportunity to work with Walken. Jeffrey Wright, Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell, Colin Farrell, Bradley Cooper, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Mads Mikkelsen are among the actors who have spoken publicly about their admiration for him. Empire magazine named him one of its Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time. In 2003, Channel 4's countdown of the hundred greatest movie stars of all time placed him at number 34.

  In 2022, Walken joined the Apple TV+ series Severance as Burt Goodman, the severed chief of the Optics and Design division, earning a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. A 2025 interview with The Wall Street Journal revealed that he watches Severance on DVDs the production sends him, because he owns no cell phone, has never sent an email, and has never used social media. His house has a satellite dish.