I have made a number of movies that I have never seen. It's not a matter of ego. It's a matter of being disappointed. It's really a shame. It's just as difficult to make a movie that no one cares about as to make a hit.
— Christopher Walken
I've been married for 46 years, and I live in a nice house, my grass is always cut, I pay my bills, and my cat loves me!
I play a lot of, maybe a little bit, cartoonish people. I've been a Bond villain, and I play a lot of villains, people who want to take over something.
It's true in most movies I don't use my own voice.
Morning is the best time to see movies.
I certainly have never been an actor who can play the Everyman guy - or, I don't tend to get those parts. I've tended to play eccentrics. I've played a lot of villains, of course.
I'm scared of everything. I think it's only sensible to be that way.
I was sort of a jack-of-all-trades in show business for a long time. I was a singer and a dancer, and then I got a job as an actor.
I've been to Chicago a lot - it's one of my favorite places. My wife is from Chicago, and I worked in the theater there a lot.
I'm not sure I'd write a good cookbook, but I might make a good cooking show.
I like cats a lot. I've always liked cats. They're great company. When they eat, they always leave a little bit at the bottom of the bowl. A dog will polish the bowl, but a cat always leaves a little bit. It's like an offering.
When I was a kid, my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It's hard to keep going when you don't get any better.
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.
I don't usually get to play fathers or grandfathers or uncles. Now that I'm older, maybe I can play people closer to myself. I'd like that.
The last time I did a movie that needed a horse, I said: 'If it moves, I'm out of here.' The worst thing is, they know when you're afraid and act up accordingly. I've had them run off on me. Horses I do not like.
Even in the limo, I buckle my seatbelt. I got that seatbelt on before the car moves.
It's interesting - a lot of good actors are good mimes. But I'm terrible. If I tried to do an impression, nobody would know what I was doing.
The thing about cooking is it's so interesting to watch. I don't know why, but if you go to somebody's house and they're making something, they usually say interesting things while they're cooking.
You know, there's nothing you can do about your public image. It is what it is. I just try to do things honestly. I guess honesty is what you would call subjective: if you feel good about what you're doing, yourself, if you figure you're doing the right thing.
By the time I was 7, I did walk-ons, catalogue modeling, you name it. In the Queens where I grew up, you didn't go bowling on Saturday; you went to dancing school.
I don't play lovers. I wish I did. At least once I'd like to have a crack at one of those guys. A heartbreaker. Some people are born to it. I'm not.
I don't know why people eat so badly. I could eat pasta all the time, but it really is fattening. And I love ice cream, but I can't do that. There was a time, until I was in my mid-forties, when I could eat a whole pizza - and really, no effect.
Movies are terrifically optimistic enterprises.
I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.
When I was a kid, I worked in the circus. 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.
I've made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you're in a movie and you think, 'I wish more people saw that' - because you're good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that's show business.
There's an impression that actors make a lot of choices. I just take what's there.
My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly imaginative, but if I look for things in different places, sometimes things happen.
I've always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre, and that's really where my training is.
I don't much like being directed. I enjoy being allowed to play.
Quite often, I'll be sent a script for a movie. And I find that I like it, so I say I'll do it. But then they rewrite it for me. They make it quirky. Odd. I find that rather annoying. I call it Walkenising.
I don't like flying at the best of times. And as I get older, I like it less and less. I don't much like driving, either. I prefer to be driven. And, when I'm in London, I don't even like walking on the street. I can never get used to looking the right way when I cross the street.
I have a friend of mine who does me on his answering machine, and when I call him, I answer. It's pretty strange.
Somebody said to me that I speak English almost like somebody for whom English is not their first language.
I have always refused to do something that has offended me. I have been offered potential roles that are totally vulgar.
In England, and all over Europe, and all over the world, actors act until they die. They get old, really old, and they're still working. They just keep doing it.
People come up to me all the time in New York. Not for autographs, but to talk about movies, often in a very scientific way.
When you're onstage and you know you're bombing, that's very, very scary. Because you know you gotta keep going - you're bombing, but you can't stop.
I think the fact that I grew up in show business had a real effect on my personality. If you were born in New York during the golden age of television, and you grew up on Broadway, that marks you.
Both my parents had heavy accents, and so did everybody they knew. It's a rhythm thing - people who speak English where they have to hesitate and think of the right word. And I think it rubbed off.
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.
You do something on television, and so many people see it that it follows you around. It's interesting. I've done a couple of things on TV, and probably more people saw me than in all the movies I've made.
There are people who are able to plan their career, their future, but I've never had any talent for that. I just do things and hope for the best. Say yes, take a chance, and sometimes it's terrific and sometimes it's not.
As an actor, I'm rather hit and miss; I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn't.
I like to stand in my kitchen with the script on a counter that's about chest high. Usually I do something else at the same time - make a chicken or slice vegetables - and all day long I just read it over and over and over.
Improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing. That's a kind of paradoxical thing about improvising.
My life is really quite conservative. I've been married nearly 50 years. I don't have hobbies or children. I don't much care to travel. I've never had a big social life. I really just stay home, except when I go to work.
I play disturbed people a lot, but always with a bit of distance or tongue-in-cheek. Most of the villains I play are essentially harmless.
Early on, I played one or two disturbed people, and I guess I must have been good at it, because it stuck. But, you know, I'm a regular guy. I stay home a lot, I make an effort to keep a distance from the whole social thing, the openings, the parties. I try to live in a calm way.
I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn't refer to anything that's real. If it's consistent, if it's entertaining, if it's interesting, it justifies its being there.
