Strange Things Everyone Ignores About Christopher Walken

Sure, Christopher Walken is weird. At least, the persona that he's built up over decades of acting has a reputation for being offbeat, eerie, and sometimes utterly menacing. By now, it's become more or less his thing, though it's worth remembering that Walken has also garnered acclaim for serious roles, including his Oscar-winning turn as a traumatized Vietnam War vet in 1978's "The Deer Hunter."

But what of the real-life Walken? Surely he's quite different from, say, his eerie psychic character of Johnny Smith in "The Dead Zone" or the complicated, comedic evil of Hans in "Seven Psychopaths." As it turns out, Walken the man is pretty standard, as far as day-to-day human life goes. He enjoys normie things like cooking (his true hidden talent) and has told reporters that he'd really prefer to break out of the weirdo typecasting more often (though in the past he's been game for many a role because, like the rest of us, he says that he's got bills to pay). Part of Walken's often untold truth is that he's also an advocate both for animals and gun control, putting him in accordance with many people.

Yet Walken very definitely has a weird side. After all, few of us have been in the acting biz since we were in elementary school, and perhaps fewer still have experience both as a lion tamer and a horse-phobe who is regularly confronted with equines while at work. What other strange things have we been ignoring about Walken?

The fact that there are child stars is no secret in the modern film industry. But it may seem to odd to think of Christopher Walken, who for so many exemplifies a singular and decidedly adult sort of aesthetic, as a chubby-cheeked kid actor. Of course, back in those early days, there was no Christopher. Instead, 10-year-old Ronnie Walken (yes, the rather unremarkable "Christopher" moniker is actually a stage name) went out to auditions alongside older brother Ken and younger brother Glenn, as their mother Rosalie told reporters in 1954 (via The Tuscaloosa News). The sibling trio was so busy that they enrolled in the Professional Children's School, a Manhattan institution that worked around a booked-up child actor's schedule.

As Walken told The New York Times in 1992, it wasn't that his mom was necessarily a uniquely motivated stage parent for that era. During the 1950s, many live shows were shot conveniently close to the family home in Queens, leading to a near-flood of local kids popping up in the growing television industry. "In the Queens where I grew up, you didn't go bowling on Saturday; you went to dancing school," Walken said. Thankfully, he never joined the ranks of child actors who completely disappeared, though he's often described his subsequent career as something more like a workaday job. Yet, at other times Walken has admitted that being in the acting field since he was a single-digit age is perhaps a bit odd.

If there's one thing that practically everyone knows about Christopher Walken, it's that he talks funny. Or, more appropriately, that he has what to many ears sounds like a very distinct accent. It's become fodder for myriad impressions, from the awkwardly bad at an already cringeworthy party to the pretty good (including a whole string of impressions performed before a very game Walken on a 2008 episode of "Saturday Night Live").

But, while some may assume that the accent is put-on, Walken has repeatedly made it clear that it's the real deal. He says that the syncopated start-stop pattern of his speech is no joke and is actually connected to the working class, immigrant-rich environment in which he grew up. "Both my parents had heavy accents, and so did everybody they knew," Walken told CBS News. "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." Well, maybe not exactly from his mother Rosalie, who immigrated to New York from Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1930s. But his father, Paul, was originally from Germany and set up shop in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria as a baker. Like many of the Walken family's neighbors in the now-famously diverse borough of Queens, Paul would have learned English as a second language and spoken it with a distinct accent — which his son now claims informed his own famous manner of speech.

As much as young Ronnie Walken seemed set on a life in showbiz, it wasn't necessarily set to be a life in acting alone. Nowadays, Christopher Walken is so ingrained in our cultural zeitgeist that it's hard to imagine him doing anything other than acting, but his early career was so varied that it occasionally included a lion or two. That would be an actual living, breathing, toothed lion facing off against a young Walken.

Well, kind of. To hear of it from Walken, the aspiring actor was never really in danger. Walken has repeatedly downplayed the experience, saying that he wasn't precisely a lion tamer the summer he was 16. As he told IndieWire, it was a bit of a fake in that the circus owner was the real lion tamer who brought a young Walken in as a pretend son in the end of the act. "[He] would send them all out at the end and just leave this one old girl, and I would come in with my whip and I'd go like that and she'd sit up. But she was really more like a dog," confessed Walken. "It wasn't really lion taming. She was very sweet."

Still, there's no denying that Walken truly did go into the ring with a real, live lion named Sheba, who thankfully never turned on her co-star, unlike some other circus animals. Besides the occasional one-off question about it, the experience rarely comes up in pieces about Walken's decidedly varied career.

You perhaps saw Christopher Walken in the music video for Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" and thought the actor did a pretty good job dancing. But it was hardly a one-off thing. For the early part of his career, Walken wasn't just an actor but an all-rounder who sang, danced, and worked with lions and dogs on occasion. According to some accounts, Walken may be more accurately described as a dancer who found his way into the acting world. That's no joke, as he not only studied with choreographer and future Tony winner Danny Daniels (tap was a favorite discipline), but danced alongside the likes of Liza Minnelli. In fact, his stage name, Christopher, was given to him by a Belgian cabaret singer he used to perform with. Later, with a rising acting career and a film industry leery of expensive, poorly performing musicals, Walken faded out of the dance world.

Nowadays, Walken has said that he doesn't do nearly as much dancing as he once did, bluntly telling IndieWire that "you slow down and you can't bend and stuff like that," but that "it stays in your bones." But you apparently can't keep a good dancer down, aging or otherwise, as Walken has broken out his dancing shoes for occasional fleet-footed parts like the role of Wilbur Turnblad in the 2007 film adaptation of the musical "Hairspray" or Captain Hook in 2014's "Peter Pan Live!"

Christopher Walken simply does not do well with horses, which has morphed into a bit of a workplace problem. His equinophobia, as it's sometimes called, proved tricky when he played the role of the ghostly Hessian soldier in Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow." Given that the film is set at the dawn of the 19th century, horses are sort of everywhere. But Walken, who's at least acquiesced to sitting on a horse (presumably the sleepiest one in the stable), can't bring himself to move about while on one. In some films, Walken-esque body doubles got in the saddle to complete a shot. Other sets used engineering to get around his horse fear. Walken's horseback scenes in "Sleepy Hollow" were filmed with the aid of a mechanical horse, reportedly the very same one used by Elizabeth Taylor back in the 1940s for "National Velvet." A similar solution was deployed for him in the Bond film "A View To A Kill."

It's understandable, especially if you've stood near a horse and realized how large and unpredictable one can be. He's acknowledged the problem is really with his own attitude, however. "I have a lack of control," he told The Guardian. "The times I've had to be on a horse, I've always been told, 'You've got to take control of the horse. The horse can feel your authority.' Forget about it. The horse had no respect for me. They always run away with me."

Christopher Walken has a thing about Elvis that really started with a rejection. As Walken told The New York Times in 2022, when he was a teenager, he asked a girl out to a dance. She responded that her boyfriend probably wouldn't be too happy about such a thing, producing a picture of Elvis as proof. Walken told her that she definitely didn't know Elvis and that she should go to the dance with him anyway (which, he admits, she did). However, he recalls being quite struck by the image of the heartthrob, particularly his hair — reportedly inspiration for a later hairstyle sported by Walken.

The Elvis-Walken connection goes beyond follicles, however. "Elvis was fabulous," he told The New York Times. "I wish I'd known Elvis. I bet he was nice." In Walken's imagination, at least, Elvis may have been nice enough to attend opening night of Walken's 1994 off-Broadway play based on the man's life, "Him." Walken, of course, played Elvis, who was on stage in a kind of afterlife with his long-deceased twin brother and a collection of Elvis impersonators. Unfortunately, critics panned the play, with a 1995 review in The New York Times saying that it was "woozily conceived."

Still, even if the reviews stung, Walken has apparently held onto his fascination with Elvis. "I think Elvis needed a good wife," he told The New York Times in 2022. "He was special. He was different. Poor old Elvis."

The precise nature of Christopher Walken's relationship with the moon is a little murky. Yes, it's a small, rocky celestial body approximately 238,855 miles from Earth, meaning there is little to no chance of there being a genuinely untoward connection there. But past reports have made it sound as if Walken, between all of his acting gigs, has engaged in a bit of moon worship here and there. At least, some of his statements in interviews have indicated as much. In 1973, Walken told "After Dark" magazine that he went for quite a few years as a moon worshiper, though he continued on to say that the passion had waned somewhat. "I remained very close to the moon, but I don't make myself miserable about her anymore," he stated (via The New York Times).

In 2022, he told The New York Times that, well, actually he didn't worship the moon. Whether or not Walken really did have some sort of religious affiliation with our planet's moon remains a bit of a mystery — perhaps it was just a weird joke after all — but he still told the publication that he takes part in some skygazing when the moon's around. "I do enjoy looking at the moon," he said. "The moon is pretty terrific, but not for worshiping."

Obviously, Christopher Walken gets out of the house. He has too, after all, to make it to movie sets and a premiere or two. But, unlike many other actors, he doesn't appear to draw much energy from the fast-paced world of celebrity and the film industry ... or from the world at all. It could be because Walken has repeatedly and openly admitted to a bevy of fears (that, to be fair, may not strictly border on phobias), including a distinct wariness around horses, cars, and airplanes. He even told The Guardian that going to other countries where drivers speed by on the left side of the road unnerves him, to the point where he has urged his wife to just hang out in the hotel when they've visited London. Indeed, he has said that he's occasionally passed on premieres that would have taken him to other countries.

But it may not be fair to say that fears rule Walken's life and push him into what, for an actor, may often seem like an odd way of living. He may well be that way by nature. As he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he enjoys a quiet life in the rural locales of Connecticut where he can "sometimes go for weeks without seeing anybody." Venturing into the outside world seems to cause more upset, as he told the publication, "When I come to big events like [a screening], it's like going to another planet."

Being a working actor can be hard, especially when it comes to earning enough income to eat, make rent, and generally live in reasonable comfort. But we can safely say that, by now, Walken has obviously made it in showbiz. For better or for worse, he's a recognizable face (and voice) who can comfortably live in the Connecticut countryside, put on a vanity project off-Broadway play about Elvis, and reportedly has a net worth somewhere in the tens of millions. So, why does he steal clothes?

That's not entirely clear. And, to be fair, it's not like Walken is strolling into his local Target and snagging something off a rack before dashing outside. But he has openly admitted to taking clothes from film sets. As he told The Independent in 2010, "I never buy clothes ... Whenever I do a movie, all my clothing is from that movie set. They don't give me anything. I steal." Apparently, some crews are on to Walken. He says that, as filming wrapped up on the 1992 Tim Burton film "Batman Returns," he had already selected a few items that had caught his eye while he played the villainous — and quite nattily dressed — Max Schreck. But, as he returned to his dressing room, Walken found that the costume department had hustled through and safely recovered the cufflinks, ties, and other bits of clothing he had earmarked for purloining.

For many modern folks, it's all but impossible to eschew technology. How else are you supposed to get work done, stay connected with friends and family, and enjoy a bit of entertainment now and then? For Christopher Walken — yes, Academy Award-winner and famous actor Christopher Walken — that's not such a problem.

Now, Walken isn't out there smashing machinery like Luddites of yore or even stomping on a cell phone every once in a while in their honor. But he does seem to have gone to considerable lengths to sidestep technology, even if he doesn't harbor any particular known hatred toward it. He has said that he's simply of an age where he was able to allow such things to pass him by — and which allows him to casually include cell phones on the list of surprising things he's never owned.

It's nevertheless hard to imagine someone not once sending an email or texting — which is just what Walken claims to have never done. He's occasionally been given a cell phone while on set, but he's claimed that it's more like a tracking device used to locate him and that he doesn't even quite know how he's supposed to dial a number from such a device. The key to Walken's avoidance, it seems, is the use of fellow humans such as assistants who can use a cell phone in his stead — something that the rest of us will likely have to do without.