Playboy Interview: Christopher Walken

People who know him only from his films usually ask the same question: Is Christopher Walken really as weird as he seems?

They're curious because (a) he looks otherworldly, (b) he speaks in a strange, clipped manner often parodied by comics, (c) he specializes in playing bad guys, often in especially chilling and original ways, and (d) he's been around for as long as anybody can remember but has never quite gotten his due.

So they'd be surprised to see how laid-back Walken is when confronted by a messy situation created by Abel Ferrara, who directed him in ''King of New York,'' ''The Addiction'' and ''The Funeral.'' Ferrara has entered Walken's West Side brownstone apartment on a rainy New York afternoon. Walken suggests the director remove his wet shoes before stepping on the soothing green Chinese rug in the living room. The two men are contrasts in style and manner: Walken is neat, meticulous, groomed, studied; Ferrara is unkempt and anxious. Walken observes the trail of blood Ferrara leaves as he steps from the wooden floor onto the expensive rug. When he points out the blood, Ferrara says he must have stepped on some broken glass on Walken's floor. Walken is incredulous. His home is so spotlessly clean you could eat off his floor without finding a piece of lint, let alone a shard of glass.

''He must have cut his foot before he came,'' Walken explains to his wife, Georgianne, after Ferrara leaves. ''His sock was all bloody.''

''I'll send the rug out,'' Georgianne says, ''but you know how tough it is to remove bloodstains.''

''So we'll be able to point out that this is where Abel Ferrara bled for his art,'' Walken says, laughing.

In his kitchen he starts cutting up brussels sprouts to relax. When he's done he wipes already spotless counters with a cotton dish towel. ''I can't stand mess,'' he admits.

His face is beginning to wrinkle. Bags are forming below his eyes. Walken is thin, 175 pounds on a six-foot frame. When he talks he pokes at his hairline with his fingertips in some strange ritual that has something to do with either stimulating the roots or tapping his brain for inspiration. He also briskly strokes his cheeks and neck with the backs of his fingernails as if trying to scrape away any loose skin. When he's not wiping counters and tables clean, he's constantly using his hands to play with his face. But there is something else about this unique actor, whose face has sent chills down the spines of audiences. He is very funny, with a droll sense of humor. He also has a great, inhaling laugh. When he tells a story and it has a punch line, he tells it with gusto. And then he laughs. This aspect of Walken comes as a surprise, because his public image is of a man who might be crippled from the neck down, as he is in ''Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead,'' but who can still force Andy Garcia onto his knees in quivering fear. He may not be able to unzip his own pants, but he's perfectly capable of instructing one of his movie goons to do that for him, and then take out his dick so the guy he's tormenting can suck it. That's the Chris Walken we've grown to love. As a ''Los Angeles Times'' reviewer observed, Walken ''can embody pure, scary evil better than just about anybody.'' And ''Film Comment'' noted that if there is such a thing as menacing vulnerability, Walken has personified it: ''He understands scary-funny better than anyone.''

He has been influenced by show business his entire life, so much so that he marks time by what was playing in theaters, who was on TV, what he was doing at the time of a star's death (when James Dean died, Walken was at a roller-skating rink in Queens). He was born, he points out, on the opening night of ''Oklahoma!''--March 31, 1943. His father was a baker, his mom a woman so enamored with show business that she pushed her three sons into crossing from Queens into Manhattan to study at the Professional Children's School, then took them on stage and television auditions. The brothers learned to dance, to playact and to stand behind Milton Berle or Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis or Jackie Gleason whenever some kids were needed as background for a TV skit. ''Those guys were kings,'' Walken recalls fondly. ''They were big stars and they were treated that way.''

Until he danced for a nightclub singer named Monique Van Vooren, Walken went by his given first name, Ronald. But that changed after he told the chanteuse he didn't like the sound of it. ''She tried out some other names on me. One night she called me Christopher and I kept it.''

His first dramatic role was as the king of France in a Broadway production of ''The Lion in Winter.'' He was almost fired for having the shakes, but he somehow managed to calm down enough to keep the job. Other plays followed, and Walken honed his talent doing everything from Shakespeare to David Rabe. Actors still talk of how he crawled on his elbows like a crab in ''Caligula'' or how he played Stanley Kowalski for laughs in ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' because he didn't want his performance to be compared with Marlon Brando's. ''It was a stitch,'' he says, ''but a lot of people criticized me for doing that. But what the fuck was I supposed to do? I never was Stanley to begin with.''

The movies came somewhat late for him--he was 26 when he got a bit part in a film called ''Me and My Brother.'' He followed that two years later, in 1971, with ''The Anderson Tapes.'' It took five more years before he landed a role in Paul Mazursky's ''Next Stop, Greenwich Village.'' Then came ''The Sentinel'' and ''Roseland'' before Woody Allen cast him as Diane Keaton's demented brother in ''Annie Hall.'' But it was Michael Cimino's ''The Deer Hunter'' that made Walken a star--he landed an Oscar for best, supporting actor for his portrayal of a battle scarred Vietnam soldier. The first real money Walken made as a movie actor was for ''The Dogs of War,'' in which he played a mercenary attempting to oust a dictatorial government. In 1983 came ''Brainstorm,'' a film remembered because its star, Natalie Wood, fell off a yacht and drowned one evening while her husband, Robert Wagner, and Walken sat in an onboard room. For years reporters have tried to get Walken to talk in detail about the event. Until now he has refused.

After ''Brainstorm'' came more movies: ''The Dead Zone,'' based on Stephen King's novel, the James Bond film ''A View to a Kill,'' ''At Close Range,'' ''Biloxi Blues,'' ''The Milagro Beanfield War,'' ''Homeboy,'' ''Communion,'' ''King of New York,'' ''The Comfort of Strangers'' and ''McBain.'' He was a villainous tycoon in ''Batman Returns'' and the evil movie producer in ''Wayne's World 2.'' His scene with Dennis Hopper in ''True Romance'' took that movie to another level. Walken also appeared in ''Pulp Fiction.'' His latest film is ''Excess Baggage,'' with Alicia Silverstone.

He's been married to casting director Georgianne Thon for 28 years. They have a house in Wilton, Connecticut as well as the apartment in Manhattan. When he's not working (which is rare), Walken likes to cook, paint and observe his cats.

We sent Contributing EditorLawrence Grobel (whose last interview for us was with author Saul Bellow) to find out what makes Christopher Walken tick. Grobel reports:

''Walken is most comfortable standing in the kitchen, peeling vegetables and cooking meals. We stood in the kitchen of his rented house in Los Angeles for three hours at a time over five days, debating whether or not his behavior was obsessive (I said it was; he didn't think so). In his apartment in New York I finally got to sit on a couch in his living room, where we shared a bottle of red wine and went over his latest appearance on 'Saturday Night Live.'

''In a moment of clarity he marveled that when he turned 53 he celebrated his half a century in show business, a claim few actors in the world can make. He still worries when he completes a project and doesn't have the next one lined up, and he compared his career to a roller coaster. 'I've come and gone a number of times,' he said. 'It's not that I went away, but I became much less visible. Then I do something and I'm back.'

''He's so funny and such a natural story-teller that it's sometimes easy to forget that he makes his living playing some of the most chilling characters known to movies.''

Playboy: How do you feel when you read an article about yourself that begins: ''There are lots of spooky actors in the world, but none more spooky than Christopher Walken''? Or, ''Christopher Walken is the creepiest man on the screen''?

Walken: I hope I'm not creepy. Creepy is not a mammal. Creepy is like an insect. Spooky is OK. Racehorses get spooked, they're emotional.

Playboy: Still, spooky doesn't often translate into heroic or good-guy roles.

Walken: I am a good guy, no doubt about it. Just ask my family. Whatever you are in the movies comes from what you actually are. One thing an actor does in his life is to try to find the pure place.

Playboy: So you would like some romantic leads?

Walken: I'd like to be acting, and acting in ways that surprise people. If that would be a surprise, sure.

Playboy: And how would you describe yourself?

Walken: Unexpectedly conservative. Anybody who gets to know me is surprised. My life is quiet. I like it that way. I'm very sensible and pragmatic. If somebody were to do the story of my life, not that anybody would, it would be about my wife and me around the house. It would be like watching paint dry.

Playboy: What does stardom mean to you?

Walken: I don't know what stardom is. Somebody once said to me, ''I saw you in this play.'' And I thought, Wow, somebody saw me, because only about three people saw that play. I felt very famous.

Playboy: Would you consider yourself flamboyant?

Walken: A little, yeah. Garish. Especially when I was younger--I was always a bit exotic. Never wore a hat because the hair was more important.

Playboy: You seldom get top billing. Why is that?

Walken: Usually the villain is the supporting actor. But you know that before you make the movie; that's all decided by your lawyer. Whenever I go to do a movie, my agent and lawyer always fight for things. One will say, ''If we don't argue about the billing it will be easier with the money.'' And I'll say, ''Yeah, right.'' And then the other guy will call me and say, ''Look, Chris, you have to put your foot down. We have to fight for this.'' And I'll say, ''Yeah, right.'' So then they argue, and usually they know what I want, which is basically: Take the job, who cares? It's much more important to stick around. Being an actor is hard. So many people want your job.

Playboy: It's been said that you bring to your roles a special way of seeing pain that other actors rarely come close to. Do you understand this?

Walken: I hope I bring a special way of seeing something. People are so mysterious, you can't ever really know anyone. I never know what anybody's thinking. When my nephew was five and his mother was going to have another baby, he said to me, ''Uncle Ronnie, my mother and father think I'm upset because there's a baby coming. I want you to let them know that I'm not, that I'm looking forward to it, because I've been lonely.'' That's at five!

Playboy: Are you always Ronnie to your friends and family?

Walken: Oh yeah. My wife, people who knew me as a kid, sure. Anybody who met me after I was 25 calls me Chris. I asked my agent if I could change my billing to Chris Walken. It's what everybody calls me, and it takes up less space. It's easier to say. But people don't like change. Producers say, ''If I paid for the full name, I'm getting the full name.'' Why can't I go to Chris? I wish Playboy would use Chris.

Playboy: OK, Chris, are you concerned about your roles as a bad guy capable of killing children, friends or co-workers? You have said you tend to play mostly villains and twisted people because of the way you look. Do you think you look evil? Is there a concern that you might become a parody of yourself?

Walken: You know what I think it is? I've been in show business since I was three, and it has left its mark on me. I come from the planet Show Business, not Hollywood--I didn't know anything about that until I got older. But I came out of show business: The way I talk, the way I think, the way I look--those things make me good for certain kinds of parts, somebody from the outside, from the border. When I was young I never knew anybody who wasn't in show business.

Remember Brandon de Wilde? He was a great-looking kid and a big star, he was in Shane. I went to school with him. He taught me how to tie a necktie. I was in class with Marvin Hamlisch. I knew him when I was seven. When he was ten he had already written an opera. Tuesday Weld used to come to our house. Sal Mineo was in school with Elliott Gould and my brother. Sal was a bigger star than anybody. He had an older brother named Vic, and these guys wore suits, had bodyguards, played cards on the weekends. These guys were 40 when they were 16. I was always at the edge, looking on.

Playboy: Were you jealous of their success?

Walken: I don't have a big jealous streak. But sometimes I feel depressed about not being better.

Playboy: Did many of those showbiz kids continue like you did?

Walken: Not many. It's unusual if they're still in the business. They grew up and had something else they wanted to do. But not me. I got to be 25 and realized I was in show business whether I liked it or not.

Playboy: Is that when you made the transition from musicals to dramatic stage roles?

Walken: I knew I couldn't stay-in musicals. Even if you are great at it, there's only so long you can do it, like an athlete. I was in a musical and a casting agent saw me and asked me to audition for The Lion in Winter, which was a play in New York before it was a movie. I got the part of the king of France. It had great actors in it: Robert Preston, who was like Booth, a great American actor; Rosemary Harris; Jimmy Rado, who later wrote Hair. It was a good show. Preston was sweet to me. He used to say, ''Don't worry, just enjoy yourself. Don't stand in the wings and say your lines over and over before you go on. You know your lines--just relax.'' And I'd grit my teeth and say, ''Yeah!'' Anyway, I'd go out there and pour a cup of wine and hand it to somebody, and my hand would be shaking so hard that the wine would jump out of the goblet. I really stunk. People would come backstage afterward and say to me, ''I'm sorry.'' And one night after the show the producer asked me to get a bite to eat and took me to this Greek restaurant. He said in the middle of our meal, ''We're going to have to let you go.'' I said, ''I know that. But give me three days.'' He said OK. Within those three days I got my shit together.

Playboy: Why stay with acting if it made your hands shake?

Walken: What else could I do?

Playboy: You won a Clarence Derwent Award for that play. What did this mean to you?

Walken: I had gone from tap dancing to getting an award for being an actor in a play I nearly got fired from. This showed me things weren't so bad after all. I got a job as Romeo and I had never read Shakespeare. I'm convinced I got that job because somebody had seen me wearing tights in The Lion in Winter and thought I could play Romeo. It's dopey, but I think that's what happened. I was terrible as Romeo. And I got the worst reviews ever.

Playboy: Do you have many actor friends? When you're working here in Hollywood, who do you see?

Walken: I know people here like Harry Dean Stanton. I'm trying to think of who else actually lives here. Oh, Jon Lovitz. [Laughs] I'm 54 years old. You ask, ''Who do you know?'' I say, ''I know Harry Dean Stanton.''

Playboy: What playwrights are you most comfortable with?

Walken: My best work onstage has been in Tennessee Williams' plays and in Chekhov's. American stage actors for some reason go very well with Chekhov. Some sort of temperamental thing. And Williams was the great American playwright of my time. One thing I know about playwrights: Every character they write is them. Shakespeare wrote all those characters, and somewhere in his head he could imagine them. It's the only thing good playwrights and bad playwrights have in common: Their characters are basically them.

Playboy: Does that hold true for actors who write?

Walken: Sure. I've never met an actor who hasn't written a movie. I've got volumes of them. Cabdrivers write screenplays. My dentist told me he wrote one.

Playboy: Did he give it to you?

Walken: No. But he wants to. I think I said to him, ''I don't want to know about it. What's it about?'' ''It's about a dentist.'' They don't make movies about dentists!

Playboy: Has anybody ever read any of your screenplays?

Walken: No, because they stink! [Laughs] I've got a trunkful of shitty scripts. When I finish one I say, ''OK, that's pretty good for a lousy rotten actor.''

Playboy: What was your mother's fascination with show business that led her to encourage you in that direction?

Walken: It was different in those days. There was a thing called the Stage Mothers' Society, 300 women who had kids. There were three professional children's schools that catered to those kids. I went 12 years, from the first grade until I graduated from high school.

We went to dancing school on Saturdays and it was as much a social event for the mothers as it was tap class for us. They would all sit and drink black coffee and smoke cigarettes and argue. I don't know about what, but I remember big arguments. It was pretty tough.

Playboy: Were you a good student?

Walken: I was never good in school. I didn't like it and always resented having to attend.

Playboy: Why?

Walken: I don't have children, and I know the law makes you do things, but I think you should basically teach a kid to read. A little arithmetic, a little writing, but if you can read, that's the big thing. That's the biggest thing my education gave me.

Playboy: If you had kids, would you encourage them to go to school?

Walken: No, I wouldn't. I think school may do as much damage as good. It did to me. It was just something you did every day. It was taken for granted. You waste tremendous amounts of time.

Playboy: You apparently felt that way about Hofstra University, which you left after a year.

Walken: I mean, it wasn't Harvard. I was in a play by Archibald MacLeish, J.B., when I was 16 or 17. I was about to get out of high school. One of my teachers said, ''You're working with Archibald MacLeish?'' He was teaching at Harvard. She said, ''Why don't you ask him to put in a word for you? You could probably go to Harvard.'' I didn't want to go to Harvard.

Playboy: What musical did you leave college for?

Walken:Best Foot Forward. I was 19, making $55 a week. Liza Minnelli sang a song for this investor--she made quite an impression. That's how we got the money to do the show. Her mother threw a 16th-birthday party for her, and the cast was invited. I danced with Judy Garland.

Playboy: Wasn't it at this time that you met Anthony Perkins, who gave you some essential advice about your hair?

Walken: Right. He had a great head of hair. He said the reason men go bald, aside from genes, is that as they get older, the scalp gets tight, the blood gets cut off and the follicles die, particularly with stress. He knew a lot about it. He said that women have a layer of lanolin under their skin that men don't have that keeps their scalps loose. He told me what you do is pull your hair forward five minutes a day, and I've done it every morning since. You take your whole scalp and just pull it pretty hard, yank it around. I heard that Kennedy, when he was in the White House, had somebody come in every day and do it for him. He had a great head of hair.

Playboy: What other beauty secrets do you know?

Walken: If you've got red eyes from staying up too late you should put warm, wet tea bags on them. It's very soothing.

Playboy: After Best Foot Forward, you did the road show of West Side Story, during which you met Georgianne Thon. Describe that meeting.

Walken: She played my girlfriend in the show, so we were together every day, touring on the road.

Playboy: Was it love at first sight?

Walken: She was a fox. She is a fox. We loved each other right away. We've been married 28 years. I was 22 when we met.

Playboy: Why haven't you had kids?

Walken: I never had it checked out. My wife and I were never interested in having kids. We're both relieved that we don't. We've been careful, and we've deliberately avoided it. Until I was 35 I moved around all the time. The truth is, I don't really enjoy the company of children. When I'm with them I think, Gee, I wish this would end so I could have a conversation or something.

Playboy: Is your wife your best friend?

Walken: Definitely.

Playboy: She has said that she stays away from you when you're playing darker roles. True?

Walken: She's told me that, too.

Playboy: You must not be seeing much of her lately.

Walken: There are some roles that are difficult for her. People won't say, ''Come on, honey, let's take the kids to see The Comfort of Strangers.'' That's not going to happen.

Playboy: You've said that your character in that movie got to you. In what way?

Walken: I did something I never do for movies: I deliberately gained weight, 20 pounds. And I don't do things like that for parts. I don't like to be fat. I felt lousy.

Playboy: You called your character a terrible man and said the fact that sex equals death in that movie scared you.

Walken: He and his wife did make that equation, yeah. And not in a funny way, like Woody Allen might do. That is the most mentally unhealthy person I've ever played, which says a lot.

Playboy: You played a pretty unstable guy, Annie Hall's demented brother, for Allen.

Walken: Somebody at a press conference came up to me and said, ''I know why you get these strange parts. It's because you did that Woody Allen movie.'' I thought, Could that be? Everybody saw that movie, in which I played Duane, who wanted to drive into oncoming cars. It could be I got the part in The Deer Hunter because of that.

Playboy:The Deer Hunter, it's been written, established you as an intellectual James Dean. Do you buy that?

Walken: No, certainly not.

Playboy: Many saw it as a political film, but you didn't. How come?

Walken: Because I see movies as movies. But if you want me to be more specific, I don't think it had anything to do with being about a particular war. It had more to do with young men's romantic notions of war, the idea that war's an adventure. They think they're going to go and have a good time, get out of the house. In reality, though, they get their legs blown off. But you could have made that movie about cavemen. It's really more about young men's naivete concerning war.

Playboy: Where did you stand on the Vietnam war?

Walken: It's maybe not a good thing about me, but I have never paid attention to what's going on in the world. I knew peripherally, but I had no views.

Playboy: What about your brothers?

Walken: My younger brother volunteered to go, and he went for four years. He was in action in Vietnam. He never talks about it, but I have a feeling he was in rough stuff.

Playboy: What did he think of The Deer Hunter?

Walken: He's never talked about it.

Playboy: How uncomfortable did it get shooting in the River Kwai?

Walken: There were little things nipping at our legs. That's why I liked making Nick of Time--it was all inside the Bonaventure Hotel. You'd go to your room for lunch, go back downstairs and get to work. That's the way to do it. The Deer Hunter was in the jungle, with lizards, spiders. We stayed in this hotel, and at night there'd be a noise. You'd turn on the light and there would be a lizard on the wall, white with big orange dots on it. I'm very squeamish about that stuff. I don't like bugs. But it got to the point where I'd hear a noise, turn on the light, see something on the wall, turn off the light and go back to sleep.

Playboy: Did you ever smoke opium in Thailand?

Walken: Somebody gave me some and I didn't know what to do with it, so I ate it after we finished the movie. I stayed in Thailand for a while and went up to this place called Pe Lot. It was like a town in a Western, with wooden sidewalks and guys carrying guns. I ate the opium and got very, very sick. It was an intestinal thing. When I got back to America I saw a doctor, who said that they mix the opium with water buffalo shit and that I had some bacteria in my stomach. It lasted a long time.

Playboy: What were the Sixties like for you? Did you go through a drug phase?

Walken: Sure.

Playboy: Did it affect you?

Walken: Yes, but it affected me for the better. It's the reason I don't do it anymore and wouldn't even be inclined or tempted. When it stopped being interesting, I stopped being interested in it. It was a relationship. We gave up on each other.

Playboy: You never had a bad acid trip?

Walken: Oh sure, sure, and when that happened I stopped. I don't even hear acid mentioned anymore. But it was commonplace then. It's like smoking cigarettes--there was a time in my late 30s when they started to make me feel sick, so I quit. I'm very lucky that way. There's a point where your body and your mind say what you should do, and if you ignore that, you're a fool.

Playboy: How good was winning an Oscar for The Deer Hunter?

Walken: I remember exactly how good. We went to the thing and there was a little party afterward and we sat with Meryl Streep and her family, then went back to the hotel early. The management had sent up a bottle of champagne, my agent was in the room with a couple of people, I was holding the Oscar. Then everybody left and we went to bed and I said to my wife, with the Oscar in my hand, ''This is a house.'' And it was. I was holding our house in my hand--I knew that's what it meant.

Playboy: Another controversial film for you was Brainstorm, which was delayed when Natalie Wood drowned after falling off the yacht that you, she and Robert Wagner were staying on. You have maintained a strict silence about the incident--

Walken: Out of respect for the family. It's not my place to talk about that. The other thing is, there really is nothing to talk about. Anybody there saw the logistics--of the boat, the night, where we were, that it was raining--and would know exactly what happened. You hear about things happening to people--they slip in the bathtub, fall down the stairs, step off the curb in London because they think that the cars come the other way-- and they die. You feel you want to die making an effort at something; you don't want to die in some unnecessary way. What happened that night only she knows, because she was alone. There were four of us on that boat, not three of us. There was a captain too. 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 the movie. She was probably half asleep, and she was wearing a coat. She apparently moved the boat around, slipped, hit her head, fell into the water. She was discovered separate from the boat: Why would she get into the boat, then get out of it and into the water? She couldn't swim. She hit her head, went into the water, the boat floated away, she floated away. In the meantime, we were sitting in the living room, the three of us, talking. And I remember distinctly that about 45 minutes after she had gone to bed, R.J. went down to her room, came right back and said, ''Natalie's not there.'' And then the Coast Guard was called.

I feel funny talking about it in such detail, but the fact that she had gone in the dinghy the night before made it sound like we were on the high seas. We were 50 feet off the beach, moored to one of those balls, and there were boats all around. It was a drizzly night, so it wasn't like people were sitting out on their decks. But there were a lot of people around. There was a hotel with a restaurant on the shore. She had gone there the night before to call her kids because the phone on the boat wasn't working. The first assumption was that that's what she had done. She was very spontaneous. The idea that she had gotten into the boat to go call her kids was not far-fetched. The first reaction was: I hope everything's OK. But then time passed.

Playboy: Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles County coroner, reported that an argument between you and Wagner may have been the reason she went off by herself.

Walken: Wasn't that guy Noguchi kicked out as chief medical examiner for being an asshole?

Playboy: He said you guys were fighting.

Walken: I remember that. There was a quote in the paper from me saying I didn't recall the coroner being there. How the hell does the coroner know what was going on?

Playboy: What was reported in the Los Angeles Times was that you and Wagner ''argued heatedly aboard an anchored yacht'' on the night that Natalie Wood drowned. ''It may have been the reason she left the two men.''

Walken: She left to go to bed. And there were three of us. Noguchi was a bad man. How would he know? If a policeman had said it, it would be one thing. The police thoroughly investigated the whole thing, everybody was questioned. If there had been anything wrong, certainly the police would have looked into it. The story I just told you is the absolute truth. Nobody can know, but I believe she went to move that dinghy, slipped, fell, hit her head and died. Not a good way to go. The woman was not self-destructive. Everybody cared about her. This is the first time I've ever talked more than two minutes about it.

Playboy: When did they find the body?

Walken: A few hours later.

Playboy: What was your reaction?

Walken: Oh man, forget it. My reaction was for R.J. To receive that kind of news.

Playboy: Have you two seen or talked with each other since then?

Walken: I bump into him occasionally, and, you know, it's sad. He married her twice. They really were a glamorous couple.

Playboy: Were you close to her?

Walken: They were very nice to me. They invited me to their home. We had a lot of fun. To have something like that happen to someone who really was loved and who was legendary--the sadness of it makes it hard to talk about. I was in a restaurant about a year ago, and there was a young, beautiful girl. I was looking at her and somebody said to me, ''You know who that is? It's Natalie's daughter Natasha.'' There was a resemblance.

Playboy: Did you ever talk to Wood about her early films?

Walken: I did, yes. She talked about those people. She had dated Elvis. She was Elvis' girlfriend at one point. She talked about what a gentleman he was. She knew everybody.

Playboy: Elvis is someone you've been fascinated, almost obsessed, with since you were a teenager. When was the first time you laid eyes on him?

Walken: I was about 15. I asked this girl to go to the prom and she said she would but that she had a boyfriend, an older guy. Then she took out her wallet and showed me a picture of this handsome guy with the hair, the teeth, who looked like a Greek statue. I thought, All right, and then I asked to see it again and said, ''This is not a photograph. You cut this out of a magazine.'' She got farmisht and said, ''Yes, you're right, I did. I'm so madly in love with him. His name is Elvis Presley.'' She went with me to the prom. I had her in a compromising position. That's what you get for lying.

Playboy: How did Elvis' look affect you?

Walken: I saw all his movies. I still comb my hair like his to some extent.

Playboy: You played archetypal bad guys in A View to a Kill and Batman Returns. Are they more like cartoon villains? Way over the top?

Walken: Yeah, sure. Those were costume movies. In the Bond film I had my hair dyed an impossible yellow color, and that became my motivation in a lot of scenes: I had a secret subtext, which I never discussed with anybody. Every time I had a scene with somebody I'd be thinking: What do you think of my hair? Do you like my hair? Do you like what they did to me? That they made me look like this? So next time you see the movie, every time I torture somebody I'm really thinking, You see what they did to me with this hair?

Playboy: Did you really ask Batman Returns director Tim Burton for cuff links made out of human molars?

Walken: I didn't ask, but it's an example of what a really good director he is. At the beginning of the shoot I was standing with him, waiting for them to light the set, and I said that in The Great Gatsby, Gatsby and Nick Carraway are having lunch with the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, and Nick notices that Wolfsheim is wearing cuff links made out of human molars. Burton calls over his assistant and says, ''Get him cuff links made out of human molars.'' Within half an hour the guy comes back with them, and I wore them throughout the movie. It's something the audience wouldn't know, but Burton knew it would be good for me to have them.

Playboy: Didn't Sean Penn also know what would be good for you when you acted with him in At Close Range?

Walken: Yeah, he really scared me. You can see it on the screen, because he did it very quickly. in the middle of the take, he ran off the set and I heard him say to the propman, ''Give me the other gun.'' When he came back I was concerned that this wasn't the gun he had left with. Who knows? He's acting like some crazy actor and pointing it at my face, and it really scared me. It was near my eye.

Playboy: Why did he do it?

Walken: Because he's a good actor. That's what good actors do, they help each other. It was an empty gun--he knew exactly what he was doing. He just wanted to scare me, which is what he did. I got mad afterward and yelled at him, then I said thank you. It's great when actors do that for each other. It's very generous.

Playboy: Penn said that you had poetry in your blood, though it was hard to know whether it was angelic or satanic.

Walken: That's a lovely thing to say. If you can play one, you can play the other.

Playboy: What about believing in one or the other?

Walken: Heaven and hell? No. Afterlife, absolutely. I don't believe in death. I remember standing as a child at my uncle's funeral, looking at him and thinking, I don't believe it, it doesn't make any sense. And I still feel that. The other night I was watching a movie on TV and there was an actor in it I really like. Then it crossed my mind that he's dead. But he's not dead; there he is, you know? Life is so amazing to me that I find it hard to believe it stops.

Playboy: You sound a bit like Whitley Strieber, who wrote about being abducted by aliens in Communion, in which you appeared when it was made into a film. Did you get to know him?

Walken: Yeah, it was interesting spending time with him. We went to his house once. Talk about eccentric guys. He had about a dozen people there who claimed to have been abducted. They were regular people talking about waking up with six hours missing or with scars.

Playboy: You've said he's like a radio show--he does the sounds, the screams. Is this in a one-on-one conversation?

Walken: Absolutely. All you have to do is say, ''Whitley, did you really get abducted?'' He'll pretend at first that he's reluctant to talk about it. He's so bizarre. I asked him what happened once they got him in the spacecraft. His voice starts to shake a little, then he gets into it. He goes, ''No, no!'' [Laughs] He does sound effects. This guy, he's his own show.

Playboy: You were friendly with Andy Warhol. Did he ever want to take your picture or paint you?

Walken: No. Andy Warhol was famous for being reticent, but whenever I was with him we talked about movies, New York, show business. He was very congenial, very intelligent, big mind. He never said anything silly. He said things like ''I believe tomorrow is another day.'' Which is silly, except when he said it you could see the mind behind it. I always thought he was rather droll. He was certainly unique.

Playboy: Warhol mentioned you in his diaries a few times, often having to do with a reporter named Tinkerbelle. Do you remember her?

Walken: Yeah, sure, I knew her. She's gone.

Playboy: Warhol wrote: ''She was saying how she makes out with everybody she interviews, that she was making out with Christopher Walken and that his wife was getting upset.'' How did your wife know?

Walken: I never knew Tinkerbelle that way. I knew her from the days I used to go to the clubs. I used to see her at Studio 54.

Playboy: Do female reporters often come on to you?

Walken: No. I wouldn't mind, but--

Playboy: Warhol wrote in his entry for January 16, 1979: ''Tinkerbelle said how could I tell people that she'd given Chris Walken a blow job, and I told her I didn't tell anybody, that I didn't even know.''

Walken: Look, I don't know, these people, really--there are things you can say about me, but I'll deny that one absolutely.

Playboy: On March 14, 1985, Warhol wrote, regarding you and actor Mickey Rourke the night of Dino De Laurentiis' dinner at Alo Alo, that before Rourke left with some girls, ''he and Chris Walken kissed each other goodbye on the lips so tenderly, it looked so gay. And Chris Walken was really drunk, he said he was tired of his hair, he'd dyed it blond, and it needed retouching.''

Walken: [Laughs] I remember Mickey was there. He handed me some sort of strange green drink. Actors do kiss one another, I don't think on the lips. I don't think there's anything going on between me and Mickey. Sounds like a nice book.

Playboy: In 1973 you said in After Dark that you thought of Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice as bisexual, ''and I suppose that's how I think of myself, too. I'd hate to think that I was harnessed to heterosexuality . . . my head is bisexual.''

Walken: Did I say that? I think an actor's head has to be not bisexual but asexual. I like the term actor, it's genderless. I call actresses actors. An actor has to see as many sides of the story as possible. That's probably what I meant. But that production of Merchant of Venice had a gay bent. The director wanted it that way.

Playboy: What does your wife think when she hears or reads these remarks?

Walken: My wife is so used to me. She's heard people say many things about me.

Playboy: Is it true that until you were 35 you never earned more than $11,000 in a year?

Walken: That's right. That was my top pay for a year until I made The Deer Hunter, for which I was to be paid $14,000. But it took longer than it was supposed to, so I made $25,000. I told Michael Cimino there was this great Cadillac that I wanted, but he didn't give it to me. I've always liked Cadillacs, but I don't like to drive.

Playboy: So when did you finally make money?

Walken: Right after The Deer Hunter, when I did The Dogs of War. That was the first time I was the main character.

Playboy: Have you ever made more than a million dollars for a film?

Walken: No. I made a million dollars once, but never over a million. I don't pay an awful lot of attention to money.

Playboy: If your films haven't always been successful, your two appearances on Saturday Night Live have been. What kind of feedback do you get when you do that show?

Walken: It's very good, people think it's funny. They remember certain skits. The most popular one is the Continental. A lot of people remember the stalker. We did a James Bond skit in which I played a bad guy. I was designing a shark tank, and I was going to throw people in.

Playboy: Do you think the show can ever return to its early glory days?

Walken: I don't know. I've been watching it as a fan for 22 years. Naturally when I think about the time I watched every week, it was in the beginning, with Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin. That was an amazing time. When Belushi would do the news and go insane, or do takeoffs on Sid Caesar or do the samurai, or Steve Martin would do his Egyptian dance, that was funny stuff. There was that white-hot thing when somebody gets very big overnight. I remember running around the halls of the Château Marmont with John Belushi, who lived there. I used to live on the sixth floor. There were a lot of parties in room 54, which is a nice, big suite facing Sunset.

Playboy: Legend has it that the SNL parties were heavy on drugs, with plates of cocaine on tables. (concluded on page 64) Christopher Walken (continued from page 58)

Walken: Honestly, that's like a movie. We had a scene in King of New York where there was a plate of cocaine, but I have never seen anything like that in my life. It was much more people sitting on couches, passing joints. I don't know if it's still like that. I hear all kinds of things about what people use. It's changed. The pills that put you in an ecstatic state--people didn't used to take pills. And I've heard that heroin is getting cheaper. That sounds pretty nasty.

Playboy: Is there a lot of jealousy among your peers? We've heard that you get jealous of men but not of women. True?

Walken: Not as an actor. In life, it's a guy taking away your girlfriend. Nowadays, getting older, I find myself around guys who are annoying because they're a little too young, a little too good-looking, a little too sure of themselves. I'm like that with my wife. The other day we had a driver who was a young, good-looking guy. He was talking to her and I thought he was a little cocky and flirty. I found myself staring at him, like, Kid, should I eat you from your toes or from your nose?

Playboy: Are you glad that you are not a woman?

Walken: I'm glad I'm not a woman for a lot of reasons. Guys have a better deal, that's all there is to it. In every way. It's just better to be born a boy child. I'm not saying that men are better; it's just that men and women are very different. There is no comparison in terms of anything. That whole thing of giving birth? That's a frame of mind that's impossible for a man to know. Getting a hard-on, that's something a woman will never understand. It has nothing to do with more or less or better or quality of mind, but it's like men have a better agent or something. They come into the world with a better shake at a career and all sorts of things. John Gielgud just had his 93rd birthday and had to rush off to do a shoot somewhere. So he's working. That's what I want. I want to do a Pinter play when I'm 92.

Playboy: Do you ever worry about that not happening? What is your greatest fear?

Walken: I'm afraid of crazy people. I'm afraid of speeding cars. I'm afraid of accidents. I'm afraid of disease. I'm very nervous getting on the L.A. freeways with a driver. They drive so fast that if something were to happen you'd be creamed. The 50-mile-per-hour limit was very sensible.

Playboy: What's the most scared you've ever been?

Walken: The time I was trapped in an elevator with an 800-pound gorilla.

Playboy: Seriously.

Walken: Baudelaire once said, ''I have felt the wind of the wings of madness.'' That happened to me once in my 40s and I got really scared.

Playboy: Did you need professional help?

Walken: I tried that once, two or three visits. He was a very nice man, and I said to him, ''I don't think this is the thing I should be doing.'' And he said, ''I think you're right.'' You have to have a sense of yourself and a perspective on life, sometimes taking a broader view and realizing you can be more daring with your mind, not be so afraid, just dive in.

Playboy: How far in does your mind take you sometimes?

Walken: That's the problem--I found in my life that I was the least interesting when I was introspective. I did the least interesting work, I was the least interesting to be around. But a lot of my troubles were absolute bullshit compared with people who have cancer or have had something happen to their family.

Playboy: Well, feeling the wings of madness is pretty serious.

Walken: Yeah, but all sorts of dopey people go crazy. Going crazy has a certain amount of vanity connected to it. Realizing there's a sort of self-centered, whining thing in you--just be brave. Somebody said to me once, ''We're all dealt a hand.'' Some people get dealt better hands than others. That's why it's no good to be jealous of others. Everybody's at the center of something. The most you can do is to be your own unique self.

Playboy: After spending some time with you, it's impossible not to notice how fastidious you are. Are you obsessed with cleanliness?

Walken: It's funny you say that. To me it's an absolute necessity. Everybody should be that way. Cleanliness is a good thing. I'm very clean. I don't like things that aren't cleaned up. But I hardly use soap at all. I don't use a lot of soap because it makes me feel sticky. I don't like to use it in my hair--I usually just run it under the water.

Playboy: Which housekeeping chores do you do?

Walken: I do most of the cooking. My wife cleans. When I'm in a hotel I make my own food and I clean up, too.

Playboy: Why is everything good fattening?

Walken: That's not true. The food I eat is good, and it's not fatty. I'm sort of a Japanese-Italian cook. In California you can get Chilean sea bass, which I can't get back East. The Chinese say there's only one way to cook fish--steam it. I take my collapsible steamer with me wherever I go. I cut the tops of leeks and steam them soft, then lay the sea bass on them and add a little dill, salt, pepper. When you take it out the sea bass flakes off in slabs. Absolutely divine.

Playboy: Do you chew gum?

Walken: No.

Playboy: Eat chocolate?

Walken: No. I don't do sugar. It has a chemical effect on me. There are very few things that get me tense. I can drink a lot of coffee. But if I have half a soda I get wired.

Playboy: How superstitious are you?

Walken: Very. About everything. Not the standard stuff. My superstitions are mysterious and very powerful. They do not have names. I pay attention.

Playboy: Tell us a little more than that.

Walken: I can't. You're saying don't be mysterious about something mysterious. What I'm saying is, if I have a feeling, I obey it.

Playboy: If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

Walken: I'd be more entrepreneurial. I'm lazy. I wish I could be more of a business guy. I admire that. I read the business section of The New York Times every week. I'm amazed by guys who understand how companies are run. Managerial types of things. It's so foreign to me. It's being like a general, which is sort of what directing is. Having a finger in many different pots and pies at the same time.

Playboy: Well, we've come to the end. Is there anything you regret talking about?

Walken: There was one thing that bothered me, and it was my fault: when I said I'm 54 years old and the only person I know is Harry Dean Stanton. It's the only thing I said that I wish I hadn't because it's not nice to Harry Dean, and I didn't mean it that way. It's actually sort of the truth, but I don't want Harry Dean to take it the wrong way.

Playboy: Harry Dean should be honored to be in such exclusive company.

Walken: You think?

I've always been recognizable, even before I became famous. The way I dress, my hair, I stick out a little.

I found myself staring at him, like, Kid, should I eat you from your toes or from your nose?