Walken ‘Tall’: Actor Gets to Warm Hearts Instead of Stopping Them

There was a certain risk for the producers of “Sarah, Plain and Tall” to cast Christopher Walken as a hard-working farmer who loves his kids and mourns the loss of his wife. Over the years, the tall, gaunt actor has elicited shivers from audiences--but usually ones of fear, not of sentimental emotion. “He’s obviously a great heavy, a wonderful villain,” said executive producer William Self. “He can create a very psychotic character.”

“The fundamental fact of life about movies and economics is that if you do something that works, chances are you’ll get asked to do it again,” Walken said at the end of a shooting day on the set of “Sarah, Plain and Tall.” Sitting at a card table under a grove of trees, wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt and black boots, the dark half of the 47-year-old actor seemed to be exerting itself this particular afternoon.

“Somewhere I got the villainous ball rolling,” he shrugged.

In his last film, “King of New York,” Walken played a convict who on his first day out of prison launches a movement to control the city as its drug lord. The actor’s troubled screen past includes a psychic martyr in the Stephen King thriller “The Dead Zone,” a maniacal microchip villain in the James Bond movie “A View to a Kill,” a rural gang leader with Sean Penn in “At Close Range” and a drill sergeant with a steel-plated head in Neil Simon’s comedy “Biloxi Blues.”

“I don’t know how other actors go about it,” Walken said. “I very rarely know what’s next more than a month ahead. Just enough time to get ready for the next role is what I get. And you know, I take the next best thing. That’s the way I do it.”

When Walken accepts his frequent stage work--he worked for years in musicals, debuting on Broadway at 17 in Elia Kazan’s production of Archibald MacLeish’s “J.B.”--he has been known to ask for escape clauses, permitting him to leave if a film offer comes up.

“I like to work. I don’t like to sit and wait. I’m not very good at making, you know, strategic choices, so I don’t even bother,” Walken said.

The actor’s blackest moment on film, considered one of the most heart-stopping in film history, earned him an Academy Award in 1978 for “The Deer Hunter.” Walken played Nick, the unstable Vietnam veteran who placed a bullet in his head during a game of Russian roulette.

On several occasions Walken has felt uncomfortably close to the characters he plays. He described a night when he was playing one of his more evil characters on stage. He was sitting in his dressing room right before the show, reading something, when he looked up accidentally at the makeup mirror. “I saw him looking back at me. I looked away immediately. It scared me. I didn’t ever want to see him again.”

Referring to Walken’s dark side, Self said that “Sarah, Plain and Tall” is “the story of a widower who’s lost his wife and is unable to love anymore, unable to give of himself anymore. And (Walken) can certainly play those qualities.

“The question was, ‘Can he play the man when he comes out of that?’ ”

Self said that he can. Patricia MacLachlan, who wrote the book on which the TV movie is based, praised Walken for bringing Jacob, an underdeveloped character in her book, to life. “Patty told Christopher that she didn’t do as good a job on Jacob as he did,” Self said.

Now it’s up to audiences to accept Walken in a new role. He received praise for director Jonathan Demme’s “Who Am I This Time?,” an “American Playhouse” TV movie in 1982 with Susan Sarandon. But even then the actor played a slightly eccentric character, a socially retarded man who came to life only on the stage.

Of “Sarah, Plain and Tall,” Walken said: “I hope that I’m accepted as

“Well, it’s really much more like what my own life is like, in that I’ve been married for 25 years. I live in a house (in New York), with nice trees.” He laughed. “And I’m a very good citizen. I’m conscientious about my bills. I play all these eccentricities, but my life doesn’t reflect that at all.”