A Legend of ‘Sleepy Hollow’ and Many Other Films

For a guy who has built a career playing weird and whacked-out characters, Christopher Walken can be dangerously suburban.

The long and lean actor often drives around southern Connecticut in his Volvo station wagon, shopping for ingredients to go in one of his culinary treats--usually fish and vegetables.

All very normal, conventional.

It’s hard to believe that he’s the same actor who put a bullet in his head in “The Deer Hunter” or threw Michelle Pfeiffer out a high-rise window in “Batman Returns.” He seems much closer to the square 1950s family man in his nuclear fallout shelter in “Blast From the Past.”

Yet, while he’s grinding herbs and chopping greens, Walken acts just like one of the scary, sanity-challenged, but oddly vulnerable characters he often portrays. He studies scripts while he cooks and as he mimics various people. He calls it looking for the Voice.

“It has a lot to do with ear,” he says. “I’m not so interested in what I’m talking about. I’m not so interested in sense. I’m interested in if it sounds right. It’s almost like if you shut your eyes and listen to somebody--do you believe [them]?”

With his rich repertoire of rhythms, his crazy-quilt of cadences that holds a lingering hint of his Queens roots, Walken seeks the voice that will guide him in doing a role. And he does it in a scattershot way.

“The way I do that is I read the script with an Italian accent, I read it like a certain kind of actor, I’ll read it like Marlon Brando, I’ll read it like Pee-wee Herman, I’ll read it like Billy Crystal--I’ll very often try to get Woody Allen’s rhythms,” he says.

“One of my favorites--this is going to sound strange--but I think Bugs Bunny is one of the most interesting movie characters of all time. His rhythms, his intelligence, his attitude is very amazing. So I’ll sometimes do the part like Bugs.

“I’ll do it as a woman. I’ll do it . . . Chinese . . . as many ways as I can think of.”

At some point, he even “will do the part exactly as if I was talking to you right now.”

Walken has two roles these days: He’s the Headless Horseman in Tim Burton’s box-office hit “Sleepy Hollow,” and he’s appearing off-Broadway in a musical version of James Joyce’s “The Dead.”

He laughs and says that in “Sleepy Hollow” he has no lines except for growling and saying “Shh” at one point. That’s because for most of the movie he has no head. But he does get to talk--and sing!--in his latest theater production.

“My theory is that you can’t surprise anybody unless you can surprise yourself,” he says.

Walken, who also likes to paint, has created artwork by dancing on a canvas on which artist friend Julian Schnabel had splattered paint. Like cooking, he creates his canvases for fun, for himself and his wife of 31 years, casting director Georgianne Thon, and friends.

“They’re nothing I could make a living at,” he says.

And that’s OK, because he has made a living in show business virtually his entire life. Born Ronald Walken on March 31, 1943, he was raised in the Astoria section of Queens by his German baker father and Scottish mother who nudged her three boys into show business.

By age 3, he was a model for those calendars that had some cute toddler each month and a too cute caption like: “When’s lunch?”

And whenever a kid was needed as an extra in the early days of live television, little Ronnie would often be there on “Philco Television Playhouse,” “The Ernie Kovacs Show,” “The Colgate Comedy Hour.”

Nearly half a century later, Walken reminisces about his early TV days in a stream-of-consciousness way. “It was like a hallucination, but it was real.”

He finds it ironic that he has been typecast as a villain or weirdo, because long before he got into movies, he was performing in musical theater as “male ingenue types.” And his first critically noticed movies had him playing a ballroom dancer in “Roseland” and a playwright in “Next Stop, Greenwich Village.”

He knows movies cost money and studios are loath to take casting risks, so he feels lucky to have found a niche, although he still says, “I’d love to play a guy who had a wife and children and a dog, and he didn’t shoot people, and . . . he was funny.”

That’s what he liked about his role in “Blast From the Past.” His character is eccentric, “but he’s also very almost ‘Ozzie & Harriet’-type normal.”

The actor, who earlier this year also played a foppish nudnik of a drama critic in “Illuminata,” says he can keep a certain distance from the darker roles he’s filled.

“I think that my strength as a villain is that the people watching me know that Chris knows that he’s in a movie. He’s playing. He’s having fun. He’s going bang, bang. You know, ‘What’s that?’ ”

Since winning the 1978 Academy Award for best supporting actor for his role of the burned-out Vietnam soldier in “The Deer Hunter,” Walken has played a pimp in the musical “Pennies From Heaven,” a Mafioso who works over Dennis Hopper in “True Romance,” and a military man in “Pulp Fiction” who nervously (and hilariously) tells a boy where his late father kept a watch so it could be passed on to him.

But he’s also portrayed a sensitive psychic--not psycho--in “The Dead Zone,” and gentler men in such productions as “Sarah, Plain and Tall.”

Nonetheless, most people are surprised when they discover just how normal he is.

“I’ve been married over 30 years, I don’t owe anybody money, I live nicely and have cats, and I exercise every day and eat strictly--I’m sort of a closet health fiend,” Walken says.

Gesturing to his own body, he explains: “Actors--you know that’s all they got. This is it. This is the factory.

“When I see them on motorcycles and flying their own plane and stuff like that, I think, ‘Hire a pilot!’ ‘What are you doing, man? Get off that motorcycle.’ ”

He laughs hard and adds: “Actors should always wear their seat belt. I drive a Volvo station wagon. . . .

“What does Woody Allen say? ‘Never drive in a country where they believe in reincarnation.’ ”

Walken hopes to live to be 100--and still working.

Sir John Gielgud recently marked his 95th birthday, Walken said, “and they threw a big party for him, but he couldn’t come because he was on location. To me that sounds like: That’s it!”