Everybody has a Christopher Walken impression. The unique, celebrated actor has earned quite the reputation for his stilted cadence and idiosyncratic delivery style — leading to a slew of would-be mimics offering to “do Walken” at the drop of a hat. But Walken himself is unimpressed. “They are a dime a dozen,” he tells Metro while promoting “Seven Psychopaths” at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival with cast mate Sam Rockwell. “I have a friend who does me on his answering machine. So when I call him, I’m basically talking to myself.”
Bear in mind, it’s not that Walken finds the calvalcade of impressions offensive. It’s more that he just doesn’t get it. “When people do that, usually I don’t know what they’re doing,” he says. “There’s a moment of, ‘What? Why are they talking like that?’ But my wife says that Kevin Spacey is the best one.”
And he would know how they stack up, as Walken admits he’s run into more than a few impersonators — even in professional settings: “I worked with Jay Mohr once, and we did this movie with a lot of dialogue,” he says. “He knew my lines, and he would do me doing a big speech right before my take. And I finally had to take him outside and say, ‘Jay, give me a break.’ Although I like him. He was nice about it.”
So what kinds of impressions can Walken himself do? Go online to our YouTube channel to hear for yourself, though the actor insists he’s lacking in the mimicry department. “I can’t imitate anybody. If I did an impression of somebody, you wouldn’t have any idea what I was doing,” he says. “This entire conversation, I’ve been doing Barbra Streisand.”
