Hollywood A-lister Christopher Walken continues to thrive and has gained a new generation of fans thanks to his turn as the benevolent Burt Goodman in Severance. The mild-mannered Optics & Design worker at Lumon Industries and his romance with Irving (John Turturro) has kept audiences on the edge of their seats.
Many viewers are keen to know more about Walken, 81, away from the cameras - here’s the lowdown. Born in New York City in 1943, Walken has had an extraordinary career and life to date after first entering the entertainment industry as a child actor at the tender age of five.
The star was actually born Ronald Walken but encouraged to change his name to Christopher by actress and singer Monique van Vooren, while he was working as dancer for her nightclub act. During his teenage years he was a lion tamer trainee at a circus. He’s worked across stage and screen with the likes of Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, to name several.
The biggest role to push him into the limelight was that of troubled Vietnam veteran Nick Chevotarevich in The Deer Hunter, with his performance earning him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. He’s built up a slew of accolades and award nominations over the decades.
Some of his biggest projects include A View to a Kill, Pulp Fiction, Catch Me If You Can, The Prophecy, Batman Returns, King of New York, True Romance, Man on Fire, and The Dogs of War, among many others. Walken’s prolific career has seen him working across genres from horror in Sleepy Hollow to musical in Hairspray to romcom in the Wedding Crashers.
The star even appeared as the angel of death in Madonna’s 1993 music video for Bad Girl and in Fatboy Slim’s 2001 music video for Weapon of Choice, which saw Walken showing off his dancing prowess from his pre-acting days. He’s lent his voice to animated film Antz and 2016’s The Jungle Book.
Most recently he’s appeared in Dune: Part Two and TV series The Outlaws, and according to IMDb he’ll be featuring in That’s Amore! which is in pre-production. He is married to former casting director Georgianne Walken after they first met in the early 1960s, going on to tie the knot in 1969.
The pair don’t have any children with Walken stating this as the reason he focused on his work. Walken said in a recent interview that Burt is the first gay character he’s played on screen, stating that it wasn’t a “big deal”. Adding to The Independent: “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.”.
Reflecting on his friendship with fellow Severance star Turturro, 67, Walken said they were like a “married couple in real life” after first meeting at a party for the Yale Drama School in the early 1980s. Along with his acting career, Walken became the subject of a hoax back in 2006 when members on an internet forum announced he was going to be running for President of the United States.
Even a fake website purporting to be his official campaign site was set up in 2005 with his fans sent into a frenzy by the fake news. However, it was all shut down by Walken’s publicist who dismissed the claims. Another nugget fans may not know about Walken is his shunning of technology despite being a show like Severance, where sinister tech is the focal point of the drama.
He previously told the Wall Street Journal how he watches Severance on DVDs as he doesn’t have a subscription to the streaming platform Apple TV+. Moreover, he admitted to not owning a mobile phone, has never used social media, sent an email or even owned a watch - the last one ironic given his Pulp Fiction monologue.
