‘Usually I'm up to no good in movies- now I’m nice’

Christopher Walken talks to Adam White about Severance’, playing psychopaths and why people love to do his voice

- Adam White

Everyone thinks they can do the Christopher Walken voice. That New York lilt. That round, honeyed purr, like a cat with plans. Try it yourself. Go on. Speak from the back of your throat. Elongate those vowels. What you shouldn't do, though, is try it in front of him.

“People come up to me in the street and they impersonate me to my face,” Walken says. “You know, they speak the way I speak.” The actor, 81 and spry, looks knowingly down the lens of his Zoom camera. “And I’m never sure what they’re doing at first. I think, ‘Why is he talking that way?’ But then I realise.” He lets out an ambivalent whine. This sounds a little cruel, I tell him, while fully aware that I was speaking pure Walkenese to a colleague mere minutes before our interview. “Oh, it happens all the time,” he sighs.

Put aside the invasiveness, though, and I suppose it’s a compliment. Abstruse, eerie, often impossible to pin down, Walken has existed outside of regular ol’ superstardom for decades now – today he’s, what, myth? A voice to be emulated. An image in a rap lyric. A dancer in a Fatboy Slim video. Onscreen, he can be cool, psychotic, slippery, wise. An offbeat talker; a light mover. He’s played an emperor in Dune, an ant in Antz, and murderers in many things. He was the King of New York. Few actors can say they feature in some of the greatest films of all time (Pulp Fiction; Annie Hall; The Deer Hunter) and some of the worst (Gigli; Kangaroo Jack; that one where Kevin Spacey turned into a cat). But then few are Christopher Walken. Except for on TV. Where, up until very recently, there were two.

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