Whether describing his father's "very black mustache" in The Comfort of Strangers, shouting, bug-eyed, at innocent grunts in Biloxi Blues, or doing a Fred Astaire glide across a pool table to the tune of "Let's Misbehave" in Pennies From Heaven, one thing is clear—Christopher Walken is bizarre. What makes him so bizarre is the question.
Partly, it's his odd phrasings. No one delivers a line quite like this balletic WASP from Queens. His mid-thought pauses and mid-syllable pitch wavering have made him one of the most imitated celebrities today. At his strangest, Walken sometimes seems as if he's an alien translating his thoughts into our unfamiliar language. One pictures his writers staring perplexed at the dailies, thinking, Did I write that? However odd his cadence, though, the important thing is, it makes us listen.
Of course, part of the bizarre Walken formula is simply his looks. With the height and build of Jack Skellington and the eyes of Bette Davis, Walken is a patrician praying mantis on-screen. And then there's his hair—a tall, malleable mane that can be shaped into seemingly impossible forms. As Walken has said, "My hair was famous before I was." His spooky looks have typecast him as some truly creepy monsters—View to a Kill, Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow—as well as the occasional disturbed hero—The Deer Hunter, The Dead Zone. His looks do half the work for him, it seems. As Walken said to Comfort of Strangers' director Paul Schrader while the crew adjusted lights for a shot, "I don't need to be made to look evil. I can do that on my own."
Another part of the Walken package is his oddly diverse career. Like Jerry Orbach, this feather-light heavy began his performing life as a song-and-dance man. A child performer on such shows as Philco TV Playhouse and The Colgate Comedy Hour, Walken later dropped out of Hofstra University to star in the Off-Broadway musical Best Foot Forward. However, Walken's creepy persona, captured so deliciously in the '90s by such directors as Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino, has virtually eclipsed his hoofer past. This might be the reason Generation Y has been so surprised and delighted by his recent performance in the Fatboy Slim video "Weapon of Choice," in which Walken taps, spins, and pirouettes through a deserted office building. (They forget that this is the same actor who was nominated for a Tony for the musical James Joyce's The Dead only a year ago.) Walken is indeed a mass of contradictions—scary yet silly, crude but elegant.
And while his selection of projects might best be described as eclectic, his career has never completely devolved into exclusively B-movie territory. For every Prophecy III, there is a Sarah, Plain and Tall. Nevertheless, Walken has kidded, "I make movies that nobody will see. I make movies that even I have never seen."
And while Walken sometimes seems to be doing a parody of himself, it always appears intentional—unlike, say, Al Pacino in recent years. Walken can laugh at his own bizarre self—and frequently has in numerous stints on Saturday Night Live. If he's bizarre, Walken owns his bizarreness. "Anything I play, my reference is completely from the planet Showbusiness. I don't know anything about anybody else," he's said. "People that I've known all my life—my family, my brothers—I don't know. I only know about me."
It's a strange "me" but a fascinating one, all the same.