There's no Walken on the dark side; self-portrait is conventional
By DOUGLAS J. ROWE
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - For a guy who has built a career playing
weird and whacked-out characters, Christopher Walken can be
dangerously suburban.

The long and lean actor often drives around southern
Connecticut in his Volvo station wagon, shopping for
ingredients to go in one of his culinary treats - usually fish
and vegetables.

All very normal, conventional.

It's hard to believe that he's the same actor who put a
bullet in his head in "The Deer Hunter" or threw Michelle
Pfeiffer out of a high-rise window in "Batman Returns." He
seems much closer to the square 1950s family man in his nuclear
fallout shelter in "Blast From the Past."

Yet, while he's grinding herbs and chopping greens, Walken
acts just like one of the scary, sanity-challenged, but oddly
vulnerable characters he often portrays. He studies scripts
while he cooks and mimics various people. He calls it looking
for The Voice.

"It has a lot to do with ear," he says. "I'm not so
interested in what I'm talking about. I'm not so interested in
sense. I'm interested in if it sounds right. It's almost like
if you shut your eyes and listen to somebody - do you believe
(them)?"

With his rich repertoire of rhythms, his crazy-quilt of
cadences that holds a lingering hint of his Queens roots,
Walken seeks the voice that will guide him in doing a role. And
he does it in a scattershot way.

"The way I do that is I read the script with an Italian
accent, I read it like a certain kind of actor, I'll read it
like Marlon Brando, I'll read it like Pee-wee Herman, I'll read
it like Billy Crystal ... I'll very often try to get Woody
Allen's rhythms," he says.

"One of my favorites - this is going to sound strange - but
I think Bugs Bunny is one of the most interesting movie
characters of all time. His rhythms, his intelligence, his
attitude is very amazing. So I'll sometimes do the part like
Bugs.

"I'll do it as a woman. I'll do it - Chinese - as many
ways as I can think of."

At some point, he even "will do the part exactly as if I was
talking to you right now."

Walken has two roles these days: He's the Headless Horseman
in Tim Burton's box-office hit "Sleepy Hollow" and he's
appearing off-Broadway in a musical version of James Joyce's
"The Dead."

He laughs that in "Sleepy Hollow" he has no lines except for
growling and saying "Shh" at one point. That's because for the
most of the movie he has no head. But he does get to talk - and
sing! - in his latest theater production.

"My theory is that you can't surprise anybody unless you can
surprise yourself," he says.

Walken, who also likes to paint, has created artwork by
dancing on a canvas on which artist-friend Julian Schnabel had
splattered paint. Like cooking, he creates his canvases for
fun, for himself and his wife of 31 years, casting director
Georgianne Thon, and friends.

"They're nothing I could make a living at," he says.

And that's OK, because he has made a living in show business
virtually his entire life. Born Ronald Walken on March 31,
1943, he was raised in the Astoria section of Queens by his
German baker father and Scottish mother who nudged her three
boys into show business.

By age 3, he was a model for those calendars that had some
cute toddler each month and a too-cute caption like: "When's
lunch?"

And whenever a kid was needed as an extra in the early days
of live television, little Ronnie would often be there on
"Philco Television Playhouse," "The Ernie Kovacs Show," "The
Colgate Comedy Hour."

Nearly a half-century later, Walken reminisces about his
early TV days in a stream-of-consciousness way. "It was like a
hallucination, but it was real."

He finds it ironic that he has been typecast as a villain or
weirdo, because long before he got into movies, he was
performing in musical theater as "male ingenue types." And his
first critically noticed movies had him playing a ballroom
dancer in "Roseland" and a playwright in "Next Stop, Greenwich
Village."

He knows movies cost money and studios are loath to take
casting risks, so he feels lucky to have found a niche,
although he still says, "I'd love to play a guy who had a wife
and children and a dog, and he didn't shoot people, and - he
was funny."

That's what he liked about his role in "Blast From the
Past." His character is eccentric, "but he's also very almost
Ozzie-and-Harriet-type normal."

The actor, who earlier this year also played a foppish
nudnik of a drama critic in "Illuminata," says he can keep a
certain distance from the darker roles he's filled.

"I think that my strength as a villain is that the people
watching me know that Chris knows that he's in a movie. He's
playing. He's having fun. He's going bang, bang. You know,
'What's that?' "

Since winning the 1978 Academy Award for best supporting
actor for his role of the burned-out Vietnam soldier in "The
Deer Hunter," Walken has played a pimp in the musical "Pennies
From Heaven," a Mafioso who works over Dennis Hopper in "True
Romance," and a military man in "Pulp Fiction" who nervously
(and hilariously) tells a boy where his late father kept a
watch so it could be passed on to him.

But he's also portrayed a sensitive psychic - not psycho -
in "The Dead Zone," and gentler men in such productions as
"Sarah, Plain and Tall."

Nonetheless, most people are surprised when they discover
just how normal he is.

"I've been married over 30 years, I don't owe anybody money,
I live nicely, and have cats and I exercise everyday and eat
strictly - I'm sort of a closet health fiend," says Walken.

Gesturing to his own body, he explains: "Actors ... you know
that's all they got. This is it. This is the factory.

"When I see them on motorcycles and flying their own plane
and stuff like that, I think, 'Hire a pilot!' What are you
doing, man? Get off that motorcycle.' "

He laughs hard and adds: "Actors should always wear their
seat belt. I drive a Volvo station wagon ...

"What does Woody Allen say? 'Never drive in a country where
they believe in reincarnation.'"

Walken hopes to live to be 100 ... and still working.

Sir John Gielgud recently marked his 95th birthday, Walken
said, "and they threw a big party for him, but he couldn't come
because he was on location. To me that sounds like: That's it!"