Christopher Walken has always been the bad guy. Now we’re seeing a different side

Christopher Walken has more than 130 roles to his name in a screen career that dates back to childhood, when he appeared on TV as Ronnie Walken. But as Burt Goodman, head of optics and design at Lumon Industries, the mysterious corporation at the heart of Severance, he’s in largely uncharted waters.

“Burt is a nice man, he’s a good man, and in the late part of his life, he falls in love. These are unusual things for parts that I play,” Walken says in that unmistakable halting way of speaking that he has. “I play a lot of villains and disturbed people. So for me it was different to play a good guy, in almost a romantic situation. It was a departure, you know, as an actor.”

Walken is speaking to me via Zoom from Manhattan. It’s an ungodly hour at my end, but for the privilege of speaking to such a legend I’m happy to set the alarm.

He’s utterly charming. And if there’s a disappointment to be noted about the second season of Apple TV’s enigmatic puzzle of a show, it’s that he doesn’t reappear until several episodes in. But when he does, it’s with quite the revelation.

Burt (Walken) and Irving (John Turturro) contemplate a mythic painting in the optics and design department.Credit: Apple TV+

Like everyone else who has undergone the severance procedure, in which the connection between the working-life brain and the domestic-life brain is cut, Burt exists in two states – the innie self and the outie, to use Lumonspeak.

It must be tricky, playing two versions of a character, finding a way to make them seem both the same but different.

“I think that’s one of the things about the whole idea of Severance that makes it so disturbing, the idea that one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing,” he says. “That is kind of a definition of some sort of mental discord, you know? And there is something funny and scary about it that’s compelling.”

Do you think of the show as a comedy, or as something more disturbing?

“Well, I think there is something about it that makes you laugh. There is some sort of strange alliance between funny and scary. You know, it’s been said that you laugh partly because you’re a little nervous.”

Making people nervous has been Walken’s stock in trade for much of his professional life. It’s made him famous, rich (presumably) and feted, but it has also at times felt like a straitjacket to him.

He has, he admits, been a little typecast – and he blames it all on Woody Allen.

“I was in musical theatre a lot in New York, then one of the first movies I got was Annie Hall, in which I play a suicidal guy who drives his car into head-on collisions. And quite soon after that, I did The Deer Hunter [the Vietnam War film for which he won the best supporting actor Oscar in 1979]. You know, I shoot myself in the head. So I think early in my career, I got started as a guy who’s troubled, and I think something stuck, as it does in movies.”

Some people strike success early on playing the romantic lead or the action hero. “And very often, if you’re successful doing that, you get asked to do it again.”

For him, it was “people who are a little twisted”. And any chance he’s had “to get away from that for a minute, I’ve tried to take. At this point in my life, you know, to play somebody’s grandfather, somebody’s father, some sort of old wise man – maybe a doctor or something like that – is a welcome departure.”

For some who came to Walken later in his career, and without the benefit of seeing him onstage, one of the most radical departures of all was in the film clip for Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice in 2001. As the clip (which won MTV and Grammy awards) begins, he’s a world-weary businessman slumped in an armchair in a deserted hotel lobby; as the music kicks in, he springs to life, skipping across the floor, up the elevator, onto tabletops and finally through the air.

It was a side of the then 58-year-old that many fans of his film work had never seen. But, he says, “that’s what I did for a living until I became an actor. I was in musicals, from the time I was a teenager.

Walken won the best supporting actor Oscar in 1979 for his role as Nick in Michael Cimino’s Vietnam War film The Deer Hunter.Credit: imdb

“Being an actor happened kind of by accident,” he continues. “I was in a musical and somebody said, ‘down the street they’re auditioning for a play’. I went and, for whatever reason, I got the part. And I nearly got fired because I didn’t know what I was doing. But they didn’t fire me, and then I got another part. So there’s something about my career that’s very accidental.”

Do you still dance these days?

“Oh no, too frail, too frail,” he says. Besides, “dancers never dance unless they’re getting paid. People say ‘let’s go dancing’. But I’ve never seen dancers do that.”

Quite apart from the opportunity to play a relatively normal guy, part of what appealed about Severance was the people he’d be working with.

Out of the shadows: We finally learn a little about Burt’s outie in season 2.Credit: Apple TV+

“I’ve known [producer and director] Ben Stiller and his family for a long time, and John Turturro was playing my love interest [Irving]. He’s a director, too, and I’ve been in two or three of his movies. So the fact that he and I have this shorthand in communicating is very useful, you know, in playing two people who are kind of a couple.”

Well, you do have a nice chemistry on screen.

“Yeah, it’s from, you know, 40 years of bouncing around.”

Severance is full of complex twists and surprises. Did you know before you started shooting where your character was going to go?

“No, I didn’t. And in fact, it’s not necessary to know that, because you’ve got the script, but there’s all sorts of stuff that happens when you’re shooting. I’ve heard them called happy accidents, and there’s no way to anticipate that.

“You can’t surprise the audience unless you can surprise yourself,” he adds. “I’ve never done anything that wasn’t a surprise when I saw it. It’s a curious situation.”

Walken doesn’t actively chase work these days, though if he’s offered a part and he likes it, he’s still up for it. “You know, you get older and the phone doesn’t ring as often. But that’s OK.”

Walken in the Spike Jonze-directed video for Fatboy Slim’s 2001 song Weapon of Choice. Credit: Screengrab

As you cast your eye back over this vast career, what stands out most – what are the parts or the projects that give you the happiest memories?

“That can be so many things,” he says. “It can be the script. It could be the fact that you were very good in it. It can be the people you were with. Sometimes it’s that they gave you a big paycheck. It’s really all sorts of things.

“Sometimes it’s the location,” he adds. “I mean, I made a movie, it’s a terrible movie but it was a great location.”

Are you going to tell us which one?

“No,” he says, with a very Walken-like twinkle in his eye. “You’ll have to guess.”

Severance seasons 1 and 2 stream on AppleTV+.