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AT LUNCH WITH: Christopher Walken; A New York Actor Takes Stardom With a Grain of Salt

AT LUNCH WITH: Christopher Walken; A New York Actor Takes Stardom With a Grain of Salt
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June 24, 1992, Section C, Page 1Buy Reprints
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Max Shreck, the villainous tycoon in "Batman Returns," would cut sleazy deals in a restaurant like Lucy's El Adobe. Dark. Anonymous. Nondescript. A Barry Manilow song crooning on the radio. Nestled on the unfancy eastern side of Melrose Avenue.

Christopher Walken enters to an enthusiastic welcome by the two waitresses. The actor, who portrays Shreck and is in Los Angeles to promote the movie, grins broadly as he strolls into the back room of his favorite L.A. restaurant. The food is zesty, the prices cheap and the cheerfully no-nonsense style reminds him of Queens, the borough whose accent lingers heavily in his voice.

In Hollywood, Mr. Walken is viewed as a skilled, untemperamental New York actor who has never quite reached stardom (despite an Academy Award), in part because of the eerie, ambiguous and sometimes quietly violent men that he portrays. Although he lives in New York, Mr. Walken, 49 years old, looks very much like a Hollywood actor: tall, tanned and lean, with sunken eyes. He wears a loose-fitting Italian-style suit over a casual shirt. His hair is fashionably spiky, and he's wearing dark glasses. As the Machiavellian bad guy in "Batman Returns," Mr. Walken virtually chews up the scenery playing Gotham City's Santa Claus with a heart of ice.

"I like Max," Mr. Walken said. "I tend to play mostly villains and twisted people. Unsavory guys. I think it's my face, the way I look. If you do something effective, producers want you to do it again and again. I've been in show business so long. Maybe there's a strangeness connected to that.

"I mean 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 saw an interview with Walter Matthau, and he said he used to play the villain, and if you're not really handsome and not really homely, they give you the villain part. That applies to me."

Mr. Walken orders iced tea and worries about the calories in dishes on the menu. "O.K., what can I do to gross out? Chicken mole? I'll have chicken mole and guacomole."

The actor, at least publicly, doesn't quite live up to the image of the creepy roles he portrays. He jogs religiously, and in L.A. drivers honk their horns when they see him pushing along Sunset Boulevard. He's an accomplished cook, specializing in healthy foods, and he keeps very thin. But during the filming in Italy of "The Comfort of Strangers," a quirky and sexually violent 1991 film, he gained 20 pounds because of the ongoing buffet of pasta and sweets on the movie set.

"The character in that film, Robert, got to me personally, and that's rare," he said. "Usually, I take off my costume and go home and that's it. In that movie I was a profoundly disturbed person. It's always more difficult when they're smart. He was a terrible man. That sex equals death in that movie scared me. He really bothered me. I was glad to say goodbye to Robert."

The customers in the restaurant are very cool about Mr. Walken, even though he has a leading role in the biggest film of the year, playing a power-starved industrialist in Gotham City who specializes in industrial waste and, worst of all, tosses Michelle Pfeiffer out the window of a high rise.

In the movie, Mr. Walken wears an outrageous wig, some fancy costumes and struts around, barking with a New York accent that reminds more than a few filmgoers of Donald J. Trump.

"I've heard that," Mr. Walken said. "Other people say that I speak like him. Well, we both come from Queens. It's true in most movies I don't use my own voice. I'm always from somewhere. Gotham City is really New York. I was born there. So I used my own voice. That's it. I never thought about Donald Trump. I thought about the big show business moguls I read about. Sol Hurok. Sam Goldwyn. Those guys who fought their way to the top. And then I thought of a lawyer I know. An older guy. Real tough. Real New York. Real smart. You wouldn't want to cross this guy. I thought about him a lot in this part. He's one of those guys -- too mean to die." The actor laughed.

Mr. Walken is self-deprecating, self-assured but quite private. He picks his words carefully. Although he doesn't put L.A. down, he prefers New York, where he lives with his wife, Georgianne Walken, a casting director, in a West Side apartment near the Museum of Natural History. The Walkens, who met as dancers in a touring company of "West Side Story," have been married for 25 years.

"People come up to me all the time in New York," he said. "Not for autographs, but to talk about movies, often in a very scientific way."

Mr. Walken starts picking at his chicken with gusto, and says that the tribal rites of Hollywood still puzzle him. At the huge, glittering opening the other night of "Batman Returns," he arrived in a limousine hired by Warner Brothers.

"I wore a tuxedo," he said, shaking his head. "I felt ridiculous. I was the only person in that entire place with a tuxedo. There were a lot of motorcycle jackets. A lot of T-shirts. A lot of sporty clothes. I don't know. I felt like I was Robert Montgomery or somebody. At the party afterward, somebody came up to me and said, 'Gee, you sure look nice.' I felt like a jerk! In New York, I know what to do."

His father, Paul, who is now retired, owned Walken's Bakery in Astoria, but it was his mother, Rosalie, who thrust her son into show business. "In the 1950's television was being born, and there was this phenomenon, about 90 live shows from New York, so there were hundreds of kids from Queens, kids from blue-collar families, doing TV shows," he recalled. "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."

Despite his early work in television, it was not until Mr. Walken was a teen-ager that he landed his first stage role, in "Best Foot Forward," an Off Broadway musical starring Liza Minnelli.

Mr. Walken pushed aside his plate, leaving lunch half eaten. He said that his current role turned out to be one of the most pleasant of his career. And the name of his character, Max Shreck, is actually an "in" joke by Tim Burton, the film's director. Shreck was a German actor who starred as the first Dracula in F. W. Murnau's 1922 classic, "Nosferatu."

"Max is absolutely out there," the actor said. "He makes no bones about his intentions. He's good to his family. He wears spats. I always wanted to wear spats." He smiles.

Mr. Walken speaks about the part -- as he speaks about his career -- with a shrug. It's only a job, he seems to say, one of many jobs that have brought him, among other things, an Academy Award in 1978 for best supporting actor, in "The Deer Hunter," as well as considerable critical acclaim for such diverse films as "Pennies From Heaven," "A View to a Kill" (in which he played James Bond's nemesis), "At Close Range," "King of New York" and "The Comfort of Strangers.

On stage, Mr. Walken appeared in "HurlyBurly," by David Rabe, and numerous productions at the New York Shakespeare Festival, including, most recently, "Othello," in which he played Iago. He speaks of Joseph Papp, the theater's founder who died last year, with enormous fondness.

"I used to feed lines to actors for him 25 years ago," Mr. Walken said. "I got very close to him. He used to call me 'my friend, the actor.' The last time I saw him I was doing 'Othello' in Central Park. He had been very ill. His son had died. It was all very sad. Iago opens the show, and the thing about Central Park is that they always start about 20 minutes before it gets dark. So if you're in the first scene, it's very intimidating, especially with Iago talking to the audience. So you look out there and you see your mother and your family and the critics and the actors who didn't get the job. You see everybody. And then I saw Joe. He was just sitting there. And then it got dark and I never saw him again."

One of the advantages of not being a Kevin Costner is that Mr. Walken can usually avoid the spotlight. The tabloid explosion about him after the death of Natalie Wood left him bewildered. The actress died in a drowning accident after slipping off a boat. The two other people on the boat were the actress's husband, Robert Wagner, and Mr. Walken.

"Did it hurt me professionally? Who knows," he said with a shrug. "It's a turn your life takes. For me the only response for years was silence. I just wanted to turn my back on the vulgarity of what was said and printed." Speaking with some heat, for the first time, Mr. Walken said, "Once, when I read something particularly offensive in a tabloid, I said: 'O.K., that's it. I'm going to find this guy.' So I actually wrote letters and tried to find this guy to look him in the face. But have you ever tried to find someone who writes a scandalous article? I never found the guy because he doesn't exist."

Mr. Walken said he remained silent out of sensitivity to the actress's family: "I was their guest. I didn't know them that well. I just decided to have some dignity afterward and be quiet. People wanted anecdotes. What we had for lunch. That would have been dopey. It all sounds so mysterious, but it wasn't. She was small. She got out and climbed on this ski thing that people use. It was slippery. She fell. She hit her head. She went into the water. That's what happened."

Mr. Walken puts on his dark glasses and is about to leave the restaurant. He is starting a new film, "Scam," a comedy-drama with Lorraine Bracco, in Florida shortly. But what seems especially to involve Mr. Walken is a one-act play about Elvis Presley that he wrote in the five months he was filming "Batman Returns."

Mr. Walken is a longtime fan of Elvis, who, he said "was very pure, but took this beautiful gift and dissolved into this toxic wasteland."

Mr. Walken is calling the play "Milk Cow Boogie," after one of Elvis's songs, and he took the Elvis role in a recent reading of the play at Lincoln Center. "The theme is, Elvis is still with us," Mr. Walken said. "He's older. He's his own age. He's lost a lot of weight. He's just been away. He's doing very well."

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: AT LUNCH WITH: Christopher Walken; A New York Actor Takes Stardom With a Grain of Salt. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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