Christopher Walken: ‘I’ve been married for over 50 years. I live in a house. I’m a very normal person’

The enigmatic star talks to Adam White about sexuality, psychopaths and ‘Severance’ – and why Madonna and Sean Penn’s wedding was the noisiest he’s ever attended. 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. On-screen, 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.

In Severance, the Apple TV+ Rubik’s cube that’s currently in the midst of its second, head-spinning season, employees of a mysterious biotech company have their lives split in half: one side of themselves exists in the world as we know it, with families, loved ones and hobbies; the other exists only within the walls of the workplace. Ne’er the twain shall meet – or even remember anything from the other’s space. But for ostensibly platonic colleagues Burt and Irving (played with such sweet, mature longing by Walken and John Turturro, both of whom received Emmy nominations for their work in 2022), something ambiguous hangs between them – either a romantic attraction that already exists on the outside, or something they want to make real on the inside.

“John and I – we’re not unlike a married couple in real life,” Walken laughs. The pair have known each other for close to four decades, first meeting at a party for the Yale Drama School sometime in the early Eighties (Turturro had just graduated; Walken was passing through). They’ve worked on films together, too – usually scrappy little comedies such as 1995’s Search and Destroy or The Jesus Rolls, Turturro’s strange quasi-sequel to The Big Lebowski from 2019. But even though Severance often keeps them apart – Burt retired at the end of season one, meaning his two lives have been reduced to one – it’s the most they’ve worked together so far. “We’ve had our ups and downs together,” Walken continues. “And when you can finish off each other’s sentences or laugh at each other’s jokes, it counts for a lot when you’re playing parts like these.” He smiles. “You can tell when people like each other.”.

Walken is talking to me from New York, dressed in a black blazer and navy shirt, his hair grey, coiffed and tall, like he’s been electrocuted. We’re speaking before Christmas, our conversation taking place more or less with an Apple-branded dart blaster aimed at us: I’ve seen five episodes of the long-in-the-works second season at this point but have been forbidden to talk about their specifics. Today, viewers will know that Burt has been largely absent since the show’s return, existing solely in the real world following his retirement. Irving, meanwhile, has been left heartbroken in the wake of discovering that Burt’s “outie” – as opposed to his workplace “innie” – is married to a man who isn’t him. They’ve been kept apart until this week’s episode, which saw the pair finally meeting in the real world and Burt inviting Irving to eat dinner with him and his husband (a cryptic John Noble). It was a lovely reunion, albeit with strings attached. Their scenes remain some of the show’s best: tender, romantic, unexpectedly, well, erotic.

He brought Tarantino over. And I remember he was kind of shy and he looked about 12. “It’s been different for me,” Walken says. “Usually I’m up to no good in movies, but now I’m playing a nice, romantic person.” And gay, which is a first. Not that it’s a big deal, he says. “The truth is that I don’t really make a distinction there. Straight? Gay? That’s never been very interesting to me. People love each other.” He shrugs.