Facts We Just Learned About Christopher Walken That Made Us Say 'Whoa'

Christopher Walken was born Ronald Walken, and is still known as "Ronnie" by his family and childhood friends.

The name "Christopher" was bestowed on Walken by Monique van Vooren, a Belgian cabaret singer, seemingly on a whim. Walken told the Tulsa World that, early in his career, he served as one of her backup dancers. As the story goes:

One night, before introducing him to the audience, [van Vooren] turned to him and said: "You know, Ronnie is OK. But I think tonight I call you Christopher. I like Christopher," and with that he was christened with his stage name.

"I just said, 'Cool!' " [Walken] recalled... "She was so gorgeous. Really hot, let's face it, that's the word," he said. "She had that European thing."

To hear Chris Walken tell it, he was simply one among many actors who auditioned - or were considered - for the role of Han Solo in the original Star Wars. Yet, according to the book How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, Walken was George Lucas's second choice for the role.

The director was initially reluctant to cast Harrison Ford, because he'd already used him in his previous film, American Graffiti. Allegedly, even after Lucas cast Ford as the charming space smuggler, he was still considering giving the part to Walken.

Walken has idolized Elvis Presley for most of his life. He even styles his hair (which he takes great pride in) after the late rock and roll icon. He told biographer Robert Schnakenberg, "The minute I saw him, I started combing my hair that way."

Written by and starring Walken, Him debuted off-Broadway in 1994. It begins with Elvis trapped in limbo with his stillborn twin brother, and ends with him undergoing a sex change operation and becoming a waitress at a truckstop. It was not well received.

Most critics dismissed the play, with the New York Times calling it "woozily conceived." Walken accepts the criticism, and admits in the Schnakenberg biography:

It was the hardest thing I ever did, because it wasn't very good. It was very, very whimsical. It really depended on what kind of mood I was in when I did it. If I was feeling silly enough, and brave enough, outrageous enough, it usually worked okay. That was usually on a weekend. Again, it had to do with the audience. There was something very silly about it that I think the audience had to share with you.

Growing up, Walken worked many different jobs to earn a living - the wildest of which has to be the summer he spent taming lions. According to Walken, he applied for the job when he was 16 - after picking it out of a trade paper. As he told Vanity Fair in 2012,

It was a touring circus that was owned by a man named Terrell Jacobs. It was just one big tent, and he was a lion tamer. He didn’t have any kids, but the bit was that I would dress up as his son in an identical outfit. When he would finish his act, there would be one lion left, and I used to go in and have this lion do tricks. It was a female named Sheba, and she was very sweet. Like a dog, really. I would wave the whip, and she would run and sit up and roll over and do things.

Walken likes to clarify that he wasn't really "taming" anyone; he just ended the show with a very well-trained lion. "Sheba. Old girl. Very nice," he says. "She’d come and bump your leg. Like a house cat."

In a 2010 interview with the Independent, Christopher Walken freely admitted to swiping his clothes from movie sets. In fact, he showed up to the interview wearing a suit jacket from his 1990 film The Comfort of Strangers. Allegedly, he's been doing this for years.

"I never buy clothes," Walken says in the interview. "Whenever I do a movie, all my clothing is from that movie set. They don't give me anything. I steal..."

Walken intended to take a handful of garments from the set of Batman Returns when he finished filming his scenes. Unfortunately for the actor, the crew was one step ahead of him. As he explains, "When I finished the last scene I went back to my dressing room and everything was gone. They saw me coming..."

In multiple interviews, Christopher Walken has mentioned that he owns neither a computer nor a mobile phone. He's also never sent an email, never texted, and never been on Twitter.

"Sometimes on a movie they'll give me a cell phone, but it's more so that they can find me... like a tracking collar," Walken told Late Show host Stephen Colbert in December 2020. "If I want to use it, someone has to dial it for me, that kind of thing."

Walken and Colbert spoke during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so the interview had to be conducted via Zoom. Walken explained that someone had to come to his house to set up the digital connection.