It's Possible That When I Interviewed Christopher Walken He Was an Alien

And that it was only later that I came across the actual C. Walken

Once Premier magazine asked me to do a story on Christopher Walken along the lines of, “What _is_ it about Christopher Walken?” So Walken agreed and I showed up one wintry afternoon at his brownstone on West 77th between Amsterdam and Columbus at the appointed time, 2 o’clock. He opened the door and welcomed me in with an impassive expression.

“Those are nice gloves,” he said. I told him I’d just bought them at Macy’s on my way up from Penn Station. He nodded absently, and beckoned me to the table in a small open kitchen facing the street. It was the kind of place Meg Ryan would live in in a movie with Tom Hanks. Comfortable, understated, normal, except that instead of Tom Hanks it was Christopher Walken, which is very different. It made no sense for Christopher Walken to live here. He said his wife did the decorating.

We spoke for a good two hours. He was neither engaged nor disengaged. He knew how to play this role very well. I tried my best, as a journalist, into deceiving him into revealing something, but he was way too good at playing a bored, but civil, Christopher Walken. I remember his telling me he was proud that he paid his bills on time, and if you don’t want to go bald, pull on your hair in the shower. He didn’t smile much.

When I listened to the tapes later, and attached his voice to my memory of the way he looked, it occurred to me that the role he’d been playing that day was like an alien playing a human in a late-fifties black and white movie, with AI providing the answers. Then I thought maybe he had been an alien, because if you were aliens who wanted to plant one of you among us, wouldn’t you disguise him as Christopher Walken because you think he would appear to us as just a normal human because, as aliens, you can’t tell how much his behavior gives away his alien-ness?

Maybe because I could tell how lame I’d been as an interviewer,  I didn’t put a lot of energy into the story. The editor at Premier said my first offering lacked “grit,” and didn’t anyone have anything remotely controversial to say about him? So I did a more serious round of reporting, and when I talked to the director of View to a Kill, where Walken played the villain Zorin to Roger Moore’s James Bond, the director told me that Walken’s drinking had been a problem during filming. 

So I went back to Walken’s people, saying I had follow-up questions. We talked for a good hour about things like his childhood, and then, at the time that seemed right, I brought up the drinking thing. Any response? Walken listened to the question, expressionless, and said that he hadn’t been aware of any problem. 

I decided not to write the story. None of his people called to ask what had happened to the story. Why would they? They were relieved it never ran.

Three years later, GQ held its first Man of the Year event at Radio City, with Steve Winwood opening for David Bowie. Before the concert, there was a crazy-good buffet, because dinner up in the Rainbow Room would be late. I was putting salmon onto my plate, next to an attractive young editorial assistant from GQ filling her plate (they all were, it was part of the deal, not that they weren’t better at their jobs than a lot of their bosses) when I saw Walken across the buffet. Walken wasn’t getting an award, he’d just decided to show up for the partying.

“Hey,” I said to the woman, who worked in the fashion department, nodding at Walken. “I spent some time with him a few years ago.” Then I looked at Walken, and said, “Hey! What’s up?”

He stopped putting salmon on his plate, looked at me, and said, now really being Chris Walken, drippingly sarcastic and totally in Walken character, “Do I ….KNOW you?” stretching the KNOW into a slow dagger-wound of a word.

He didn’t.

The editorial assistant was not impressed. 

Bowie’s show was insane. Best concert I ever saw. Later, at dinner in the Rainbow Room, down in the center of the room at the head table Walken was seated next to Bowie. I was at a table with other writers up in the distant wings, Siberia that night, and rightfully so.