Latest news with #ChristopherWalken
Telegraph
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘Roger did not get the joke': Why A View to a Kill is Bond at his ridiculous best
There's a rule about the Roger Moore Bond films: the more ridiculous and less believable it is that Rodge himself is performing the stunts – whether he's skiing off a 7,000ft mountain in The Spy Who Loved Me or clambering across a train in Octopussy – the more entertaining he is. That's never truer than in A View to a Kill, Moore's final outing as 007, which premiered 40 years ago. Rodge – a less-than-spritely 57 by this point – escapes KGB agents by snowboarding through the mountains of Siberia (cut to a cover of The Beach Boys ' California Girls) and dangles from the swinging ladder of a high-speed fire engine. In the end, he fights Christopher Walken at 750 ft on the Golden Gate Bridge. Moore's age is a common criticism of A View to a Kill, which – it's fair to say – is not the most critically adored Bond film. Moore himself named A View to a Kill as his least favourite due to violence. And when I ask director John Glen where A View to a Kill sits within his five films as director, he responds, 'Roger was knocking on a bit. We all knew, including Roger, that it was his last Bond.' But A View to a Kill is a perfect swansong for the japery of the Roger Moore era. All the distinct pleasures of Moore's tenure are present and correct and magnified by the fact that Bond is – in Moore's own words – 'a bit long in the tooth'. There's thrilling stunt work by stunt men who are definitely not Roger Moore; knowing gags that raise an eyebrow to the audience; the queasy canoodling of any young woman within his vicinity; and the relentless innuendo ('I'll fill you in later, Moneypenny… I'm an early riser myself…I got off eventually', etc). It's all right there in the pre-title sequence. After the Beach Boys snowboard escape – a brilliantly inventive chase – Bond sneaks into an iceberg-shaped submarine, immediately patronises the delectable helmswoman ('Be a good girl would you and put her in automatic') then bumps the controls so she falls onto his bed. But 57 or not, Bond is still Bond, and when the titles kick in – a day-glo sequence set to the walloping synths of the Duran Duran theme – it's absolutely electric, charged by an excitement that's unique to Bond films. A View to a Kill also has two of the great Eighties Bond baddies: Walken's Max Zorin, a maniac industrialist who was born of a Nazi genetics experiment (naturally); and Grace Jones as Bond girl-cum-henchwoman, May Day. In the film, May Day parachutes off the Eiffel Tower – the film's signature stunt, performed by BJ Worth – while behind the scenes Grace Jones got on Rodge's wick. 'I've always said if you've nothing nice to say about someone, then you should say nothing,' wrote Moore in reference to Jones. 'So I'll say nothing.' Roger Moore had hinted that every Bond film would be his last for several years before A View to a Kill. It was all a bit of a game to increase his pay cheque next time around – to add a few more double-Os, perhaps. But writing in his memoir, Moore reflected that he really was taking stock of his career and thinking about winding down when producer Albert 'Cubby' Broccoli asked him to play Bond again. Moore was game. 'I was pretty fit and still able to remember lines,' he wrote. The script – by Richard Maibaum and co-producer Michael G Wilson – had little to do with the Ian Fleming short story, From a View to a Kill, other than the title and Paris setting. In the film, Zorin plans to kickstart an earthquake that will wipe out Silicon Valley, allowing him to take control of the booming microchip business. Yes, Moore's flared tuxedo may have been a touch behind the times, but Zorin was of the technological moment. Forty years on, Zorin now looks like the original tech bro, prefiguring all those jokes about how tech billionaires such as Elon Musk are almost real-life Bond villains, with their plans to travel to space and conquer Mars. 'Maybe he saw my films!' says John Glen, laughing. Zorin's plans were foiled before production began, though. The famed 007 stage at Pinewood Studios, which was set to hold Zorin's network on mines, burned down in June 1984, while being used for Ridley Scott's Legend, and had to be rebuilt. As for Zorin himself, David Bowie was offered the role but declined – 'I didn't want to spend five months watching my double fall off mountains,' Bowie said – and Sting had meetings. Christopher Walken, however, was a different class. He was already an Oscar winner by this time, having won a Best Supporting Actor statue in 1979 for The Deer Hunter. 'They sent me a script, it seemed like a good job,' Walken later recalled. 'I knew there were lots of reasons to do it. How many times does an actor get to be in a Bond film? That would just be fun to do that.' With his off-world stare and trademark lilt ('You am- USE me, Mr Bond'), Walken is an elite level Bond villain. A by-product of being genetically engineered by Nazis, we are told, is also being psychotic. He drops uncooperative business associates out of his airship and laughs to himself as he machine-guns an army of his own workers. Moore later pointed to that moment as the reason A View to a Kill was his least favourite Bond. 'Too violent,' Roger said in 1996. 'There was no slow-motion, blood-spewing Sam Peckinpah action, but with the machine-guns and thousands of people getting blown away, the violence was too gratuitous.' Walken certainly seems to relish in the violence of the massacre. 'I just let him go,' says Glen about Walken's machine-gun performance. Elsewhere, Zorin kills Patrick Macnee's MI6 agent Sir Godfrey Tibbett, putting an end to what was essentially a dream team pairing of James Bond and John Steed (whom Macnee played in ITV's The Avengers) and forcing Moore's most serious moment in the film. The story begins with 007 attending a horse auction at Zorin's estate. Zorin is both a racehorse breeder and cheat – the horses are doped by his Nazi scientist creator. Bond wanders around spying on Zorin with massive polarising sunglasses – the most glaringly conspicuous bit of gadgetry in Q's arsenal – and chats up much younger women. 'I was hoping we'd spend the evening together,' he tells sexy geologist Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts) 60 seconds after meeting her. Bond meets his match in the bedroom, however, when he slips between the sheets with Grace Jones's May Day, who looks like she could ravage Moore to a pulp. During filming. Jones surprised him in bed with a menacingly large dildo. Moore did not appreciate it. 'We played a few tricks, as we always did on the Bond films,' says John Glen. 'She was in on it... It's the first time I'd ever known him not to take the joke. He got a bit upset about it, I must say. Normally it was him playing a joke on everyone else.' Though Grace Jones wrote glowingly about Moore in her autobiography, calling him a 'softie', Moore was less complimentary. He described in his memoir how she played loud heavy metal in her dressing room, which ruled out an afternoon nap. 'I did ask Grace to turn it down several times, to no avail,' Moore wrote. 'One day I snapped. I marched into her room, pulled the plug out and then went back to my room, picked up a chair and flung it at the wall. The dent is still there.' The scenes at Zorin's estate were filmed at Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. Glen recalls that Walken had a tendency to get bored between set-ups and wander off. 'There was a lot of waiting around,' he says. 'Christopher would go off for a walk in the hundreds of acres of woods and we'd have to send search parties. In the end I delegated one assistant director to watch him all the time so we could keep tabs by radio. It became a game. Christopher would watch this assistant and the moment the assistant took his eyes off him, he was gone!' Production also visited Paris to shoot major action sequences, including May Day's BASE jump from the Eiffel Tower. Parachuting off the Eiffel Tower was suggested by stuntman BJ Worth during Moonraker, and had appeared in a draft of the Moonraker script. With the stunt greenlit for A View to a Kill, Worth and skydiving pal Don Caltvedt performed 22 jumps from a hot air balloon. They had to get the precise timing to safely open the parachute from 900 ft and clear the outward slope of the tower. They worked out that they needed to pull their chutes after three seconds, which they timed with the changing pitch of the wind in their ears. But getting permissions in Paris was complicated. As well as the Eiffel Tower BASE jump, they needed approval for veteran stunt driver Rémy Julienne to drive a cut-in-half Renault 11 around a one-way system (going the wrong way, of course) along the Seine. The filmmakers had to schmooze numerous local authorities for the necessary permissions. But plans were almost compromised when in April 1984, ahead of filming, a London couple sneaked past security measures at the tower and jumped with parachutes hidden in backpacks. Paris authorities were concerned that the couple got the idea after hearing about the upcoming 007 stunt, and almost withdrew the film's permissions. Fortunately, BJ Worth was allowed to make the jump, which he did from a driving board-like platform. (Glen recalls his reaction to first seeing the platform during practices: 'I said, 'You can't use that! This is a world-renowned landmark! You can't change the silhouette of it!') Incredibly, Worth fell asleep on the scaffolding at the top of the tower while he waited 15 minutes for a camera reload. His adrenaline had been pumping so hard in the build-up that he shut down as soon as there was a delay. The jump was a success and Cubby Broccoli declined to risk filming a second attempt. However, backup jumper Don Caltvedt was miffed that he didn't get his turn, so crept up the tower early in the morning with a friend and craftily jumped without anyone knowing – or so he thought. The crew was already setting up for the next day's shooting and Caltvedt plummeted past Glen and his team. Worth fired him on the spot, and the Paris authorities almost pulled permissions once again 'I was very upset about that,' remembers Glen. 'It was incredibly irresponsible to jeopardise our shoot in Paris. To do jumps on the Eiffel Tower we had to get top permissions and had to assure them that we wouldn't do anything to embarrass them.' There were no such problems with permissions when the production moved to San Francisco for the second half of the film. The San Francisco mayor, Dianne Feinstein, was happy to host Bond and was especially enamoured by Roger Moore. 'It was lucky and fortunate enough that she was one of the rare people that preferred me as Bond instead of Sean [Connery],' Moore later said on a making of documentary. 'And so, we got all sorts of permits.' 'Her first question was, 'How much are you going to spend in the city?'' says Glen. 'We said, 'About four million'. She said, 'Do anything you like!' When we told her we wanted to burn down City Hall she said, 'If it's OK by the fire chief, it's OK by me.'' Rather than actually burning down San Francisco City Hall, Glen and his crew lined the roof with gas burners. (Torching the building is one of several Zorin plans to bump off Bond rather than just shooting him on the spot. See also: challenging 007 to a horse race rigged with traps, and locking him in a car and pushing it into a lake). In the following action sequence, Bond and Stacey Sutton steal a fire engine and race through San Francisco. Stacey steers as Bond clings to the ladder. It took almost three weeks to complete, with shots of a stuntman hanging off the ladder and dodging oncoming traffic, spliced with close-ups of Moore. Critics and fans have poked fun at A View to a Kill for several shots of stunt doubles who are quite obviously not Roger Moore – but that's all part of the fun of it. Glen laughs about the fact he switched Moore for stunt double Martin Grace at every opportunity. 'Roger wasn't particularly athletic,' says Glen. 'He couldn't really run very well. We'd always stick Martin Grace in where we could to double for him!' It certainly wasn't Moore at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge for the climactic punch-up between Bond and Zorin, after Zorin's airship gets stuck on the north tower. Though Moore did climb up one of the replica bridge sections built at Pinewood. 'I wasn't paid enough to climb the real one,' he later said. Much of the fight is taken from shooting on the Pinewood replicas, but the shots that are taken from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge are stomach-lurchingly impressive – Martin Grace doubles for Moore on the massive sloping cables. 'We were limited with what we could do because we were right above all the traffic,' says Glen. 'But we did a bit of stuntmen fighting with safety wires on them.' Zorin, unhinged until the end, laughs as he falls to his death from the bridge. Walken was laughing for real. 'I was hanging there and I was about to fall off the bridge on to some mattresses,' he said. 'It struck me as funny, that's all.' A View to a Kill premiered in San Francisco on May 22, 1985, the last of Roger Moore's seven films as 007. Though not Moore's finest outing, A View to a Kill still demonstrates the magic of his tenure – his screen persona. That's why even at 57, he gets away with it. You don't need to believe that Roger Moore can kill a man with his bare hands or snowboard away from the KGB. The film would also facilitate a necessary change for the Bond series. After A View to a Kill, the Bond team set out to find a more serious actor and ultimately cast Timothy Dalton for 1987's more Fleming-esque The Living Daylights, which Glen also directed. 'We had to make a radical change,' says Glen. 'Roger's Bonds were light-hearted. Timothy Dalton's Bond was more akin to Sean Connery. We were going back to the darker, laconic type of Bond. We had to go back to the original Fleming concept… We'd had our fun with Roger.'
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Handmaid's Tale' star Amanda Brugel is excited to 'grow' after the series, reveals one show she can't watch after her exit
One of Canada's most acclaimed actors, for more than 25 years Amanda Brugel has starred in beloved projects, comedies like Kim's Convenience and Workin' Moms, to dramas including Dark Matter, The Handmaid's Tale and Brandon Cronenberg's film Infinity Pool. She was also a judge on Canada's Drag Race. An absolute powerhouse as an actor, Brugel's career in entertainment actually began as a ballet dancer, where she recognized that she had a love for performing at a young age. But a moment on stage in a high school play solidified that this was the right career path for her. "I really wanted to be an actor when I was younger and tried to type out little letters to agents, and my parents just wouldn't let me," she said. "I tried to mail them and I found them actually hidden a couple years after my parents told me they sent them. I found them hidden behind a bookshelf." "The moment I stood on that stage, facing outward, it was an empty auditorium, but the moment I stood on that stage, it's very cliché, but I just felt whole and like I belonged." Looking back, Brugel is happy that her parents put the brakes on her attempt to be a child actor. "I just don't know if it would have been great for a Black, biracial kid growing up in the '80s to be thrust into on sets," she said. "And so I'm really thankful for them that they did that." "One thing my parents did ... when I decided to go into acting for university, and even when I quit acting ... in my early 30s, and then decided to go back into it, my parents encouraged me, and they said, 'This is your dream. It's not the most stable, it's chaotic. It's probably going to break your heart, but it's your dream, so go for it.'" But while the film and TV industry has long favoured young women for the best roles, Brugel highlighted that being on her most high-profile projects in her 40s, working toward success for decades, there's a "resilience" that she established. "I've seen people have the reverse, where they had very big, large success at the very beginning and without that resilience, as soon as they sort of started to hit a wall, it almost broke them. And so I'm appreciative for the hell that I went through," she said. Brugel was still in university when she landed a role in the 1999 movie, starring Christopher Walken, Bruce Davison and Joaquim de Almeida. Set in 1890 New Orleans, Vendetta is based on a true story about the largest lynching in American history. After the police chief was killed, Sicilian dock workers were tried for murder. "I was just just really excited to be able to start being on film sets," Brugel said about working on the film. "I went to theatre school, I went to York [University], but film sets are an entirely different beast." "[Christopher Walken and I] had a scene and he was very nice, and the scene was cut. I wasn't even devastated. I was just so happy to have had the the chance." While Brugel went on to continue to audition for different projects, taking on roles in episode of various TV shows like Soul Food, Leap Years, Wild Card, Doc and The Newsroom, Brugel described the process of auditioning, particularly during that time, as "devastating and heartbreaking and confidence shattering." "To be able to be successful in this business as an artist, you have to be two very different personalities," she said. "And so luckily for me, I am the type of person that when presented a challenge, I don't crumble. I rally against it. That's not always good. That's stubbornness, that's a slight amount of arrogance, which is necessary. But it is in me. "So even though it was really difficult, sometimes working three jobs, I worked as a perfume salesperson at [Holt Renfrew] and I sold dog and cat perfume, ... and I worked at a hostess at a restaurant at Yonge and Eglinton [in Toronto], and then I would do temp work sometimes for offices. And so you're doing that and then you get a call for an audition. ... But it really built up a resilience that I really appreciate." Brugel actually went to university with Kim's Convenience co-creator, Ins Choi, and even read a first draft of the play at a coffee shop on campus. Playing the role of Pastor Nina Gomez, the show was one of few Canadians projects that wasn't just embraced in Canada, but had international fandom. "It felt like a first," Brugel said. "It's not like it was in hindsight that we realized, 'Oh, this is sort of a first and we are relatable globally,' we really were cognizant of that, and it was exciting, and there was a lot of pride in it." "When you have a group, a company, your cast and crew, a part of something that you know is bigger than you, it really lifts it. I really think that it built everyone. It made everyone bring their A-game. Because not only were we doing this for our own individual careers or only individual successes, we realized that we had a story to tell that was impacting people on a global level, which was really exciting and very rare, particularly for a Canadian television show. And so it was thrilling. I still call it summer camp. It's still one of my favourite jobs that I've ever done." Fans of Kim's Convenience will remember the unexpected cancellation of the series. Brugel feels "equally as disappointed" about the show's ending now than she did when it happened back in 2021. "I think I would not have been as disappointed if we had been warned, if the stories had been wrapped up with the same amount of care and just grace that we had been given from season to season," she said. "It just felt like the carpet was ripped out from under everyone, and that the characters weren't honoured in the way that they should have been." While Brugel is likely more known for her more dramatic roles, Kim's Convenience shows her great range as an actor, and an example of how she likes to jump and forth between different genres. "It started as a very specific strategy between myself and my agent, in which we were really trying to not have me typecast as a Black, biracial woman in Canada. There were only so many roles available," she said. "And very quickly I realized I was only being offered just the the most stereotypical roles that you can imagine in the '90s and then early 2000s, and so we just decided if I tried to ... seek out different genres, people wouldn't really be able to pin me down." "Drama is the trickiest for me, I will say. ... I think my personality is not really muted. I'm quite emphatic. I'm a little silly and loose, and for drama, technically, you have to sort of be still, a little more stoic. You can be crazy, but just technically, for me, there's not as much room to improvise and play, and have a lot of fun and take a lot of really crazy swings. And so that's why I feel a little more constricted with drama and that I have to behave." Among all of Brugel's impressive projects, being a judge on Canada's Drag Race Season 2 will always be a memorable moment for her. "I only got to do one season and I still love it," she said. "I loved it wholeheartedly. I love drag queens. I love the art of drag. I loved my cast. The experience, it was beautiful." She added that it's "still a big deal" that she could only participate in one season on the non-union production. "I haven't watched the seasons afterwards because I can't, and I'm not that kind of person. If I don't get a job or if I lose out to a role, I'll still watch the movie and celebrate the actor." "But Drag Race, no, no, I can't watch it after my season. I'm too heartbroken. Still, I'll talk to my fellow judges. I talk to them a lot, but I can't watch my chair filled by another." Collaborating with Jeremy LaLonde and Jonas Chernick, her fellow co-writers for Ashgrove, it all started with an idea to improvise a movie. The result was a psychological thriller set during a water pandemic and Dr. Jennifer Ashgrove, played by Brugel, is the world's best chance for a cure. But experiencing a "blackout," she's instructed to take some time off of work, heading to a rural farmhouse with her husband Jason (Chernick) and their friends. "I wish that every project that we were able to, specifically actors, were able to go into it like we did with Ashgrove," Brugel said. But the way Ashgrove came together as a film was actually a surprise to Brugel. "It was pre-COVID, but [Jeremy LaLonde and Jonas Chernick] had this idea to do sort of a dramatic exercise, in which we would improvise a movie," she explained. "Structure all of the scenes and be quite detailed with the story we wanted to tell, but having the ability to play and have freedom and improvise together." "That being said, I did not know that behind my back they were creating a different story. And there was a documentary being made about the fact that I thought I was on one path, making one movie, where in reality, they were making a completely separate movie, and I was new to all of the decisions and choices. So all of the reactions are in real time. And I had no idea how the story was going to end, and I did not know that everyone else was in on it, except me." For another Dark Thriller, Brugel took on the role of Blair Caplan in the Apple TV+ sci-fi, thriller series Dark Matter, and sharing the screen with Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly was a highlight for her. Teasing what we can expect from Season 2, Brugel gets to really dive into the research for the character, specifically for the quantum physics elements of the show. "To be completely honest, I thought if I have a couple scenes with either one of them, I would love to have it for my reel," Brugel said. "I really did it thinking it was just going to be ... a fun role for me to play, not realizing how much I would fall in love with Chicago, with the Chicago crew, the showrunner and creator Blake Crouch and his wife, [Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry]. They're just the nicest, most collaborative people, and they're so generous and and the story is fantastic. The acting is great. It is currently, in my adult life, my dream job." With The Handmaid's Tale in its sixth and final season and filming of the series spanning 10 years, Brugel's character Rita quickly became, and still is, one of the most beloved characters in the show. While the series has been a massive success, Brugel is ready to move on to new projects. "I am eternally grateful for what that show did for my career at 40 years old, in a business that has told me from the beginning that I will expire by then," Brugel highlighted. "But I am thrilled to be able to venture off into other things." "Staying with the character for 10 years, you get very comfortable, which is beautiful because it can help with performances. ... As an artist you need to be challenged. You need to fail. You need to have to go and research quantum physics. You just need to grow. And I felt like I had grown as much as I possibly could, and I'm thrilled for it, but I'm happy to say goodbye." While Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel has been particularly impactful for many since it was published, the story was amplified when the show was released, with the resurgence of the red Handmaid's cloak as a symbol in the fight for women's rights around the world. "I still don't know if I really wrapped my brain around the impact of it, and the only time I am able to is when I go to really remote places around the world, a small towns outside of Hungary and I'm the only visible minority in the area, and people will run and want to hug me and talk to me about Rita," Brugel said. "The human connection with strangers and the stories that have come out of it are the thing that I really started to realize, oh, this is massive. This is different. It's one thing to be a fan of a show and a character, but it's one thing to be able to connect with people on such an intimate level so quickly that I don't know if I will ever have that again, and that is what I will miss. That is what I do still love and did love about being a part of something like that, with the conversations that were inspired from our show."
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
SNL stars name their favorite sketches
NEW YORK, N.Y. (WSAV) — Legions of comedic talent have paraded through NBC's Studio 8H, whether as cast members, writers or hosts of 'Saturday Night Live.' As the sketch show marks its 50th anniversary with a host of celebration, its cast members and alumni look back on their favorite sketches and the enduring legacy of 'Saturday Night Live.' FAVORITE SKETCH: 'The Wizard of Oz' 'There's a 'Wizard of Oz' one that we did that actually John Mulaney wrote, where there's like this new footage of 'Wizard of Oz,' of a character that got cut out of a movie, and it's a weather vane,' said Armisen, who played Weathervane alongside Anne Hathaway's Dorothy. 'Something about it, I just I really love that sketch.' FAVORITE SKETCH: 'Everything is amazing,' the current cast member said, but she seemed to hope the anniversary special would see a reprise of 'The Californians.' 'All of it are sort of 'pinch me' moments and I feel like it'll be even bigger than the 40th,' she said of the upcoming special. FAVORITE SKETCHES: 'More Cowbell,' with Christopher Walken fixated on adding that signature sound to Blue Öyster Cult's 'Don't Fear the Reaper.' Forte named a few, but 'Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer' was another favorite. Then, of course, there's Adam Sandler's classic 'The Chanukah Song.' 'I hadn't seen 'The Chanukah Song' in a long time. … It just happened to be on the other day,' said Forte, who was freshly reminded: 'It's so good.' FAVORITE SKETCH: 'More Cowbell,' perhaps a universal favorite. 'I think 'Cowbell' would work if English was your like 10th language. … I think that's a safe pick,' he said. 'It's Will Ferrell at the height of his powers. … It's an all-time host Christopher Walken doing a thing that only Christopher Walken could do.' (Of the last 12 months, Meyers is also partial to Nate Bargatze's 'Washington's Dream' sketches.) WHY 'SNL' ENDURES: To Meyers, who now hosts 'late Night in Studio 8G, 'Saturday Night Live' is like sports. It's live. No one knows what's going to happen. 'It's so beautifully uneven. I've always said the worst show has something great and the best show has something terrible,' Meyers said. 'And there's no there's no host that can guarantee consistency. … If you laid all the Alec Baldwin-hosted episodes out there, there's a huge gap between the best one and the worst one. And there's no real reason to explain that, other than just everybody sort of had a bad week.' FAVORITE SKETCHES: 'Haunted Elevator,' with Tom Hanks as the spooky-yet-goofy David S. Pumpkins; 'Calculator Christmas Gift,' where Fred Armisen and John Malkovich have their odd holiday wish list fulfilled; 'Tennis Talk with Time-Traveling Scott Joplin,' which is somehow exactly what it sounds like. 'David Pumpkins always comes to mind as just, like, the weirdest thing we ever got on. And I love the idea of future generations trying to figure it out, as well,' said Moynihan, who added that he was drawn to 'amazing, weird sketches.' FAVORITE SKETCHES: 'Toilet Death Ejector,' an infomercial flogging an 'elegant' solution to avert the indignity of dying on the commode, and 'Monkey Trial,' featuring, yes, a monkey but not one on trial — one presiding over it. 'Those are two quality Simon Rich premises executed,' said Mulaney, who wrote the former with frequent collaborators Rich and Marika Sawyer and the latter with Rich. Both sketches date to Mulaney's hosting stints. FAVORITE SKETCH: 'Plato's Cave' from the Not Ready for Prime Time Players era, where Steve Martin plays a beatnik, and 'The Swan,' a parody of a 2000s reality show. 'I remember seeing there was a horrible reality show called 'The Swan' where they did this massive plastic surgery on people. And I think they did a parody of that with Amy Poehler and a bunch of other people. And it was the first time I'd seen her and I was like, 'My God, this girl is so good,'' Newman said. 'But as far as our show, I think that this one sketch called 'Plato's Cave' or the beatnik sketch, is, I think, a really good representation of our show. And it's the whole cast.' WHY 'SNL' ENDURES: There's a long list of people responsible, she says, but atop that list? Show creator Lorne Michaels. 'The fact that the show has remained relevant is because of the approach that Lorne has, which is that he always has new people, whether they be writers or performers with new perspectives and original ideas and characters,' Newman said. 'And that's, I think, what moves the show along in terms of tone and relevance.' FAVORITE SKETCH: 'What's Up With That?' a recurring series with Kenan Thompson as a game show host. 'Part of the reason I put it in there is because I feel very proud of the group, the generation I came up on and through the show … both on camera and behind the scenes,' Sudeikis said, noting the 'real wild' cameos like Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. WHY 'SNL' ENDURES: It has good people, and they know where the line is. 'We work with brilliant people. I think we all have a pretty solid sensibility, where we kind of know where the offense is and we work really hard trying not to tread in places that are uncomfortable or whatever without warrant,' the longtime cast member said. 'But at the same time, I can't please everybody and we're still trying to like, like lighten the mood, if you will. So, you know, we're doing that as long as we're not like overly stepping — like if you step on a toe, you say, 'I'm sorry. Excuse me.' Then that should be OK. … We should be able to just move on and continue to explore or continue conversations that may or may not be uncomfortable. That's kind of our job.' WHY 'SNL' ENDURES: At its heart, it's a variety show. 'I think with a show like 'SNL,' we have the latitude to be a little variety show and give you different sensibilities and different parts of that, different perspectives. I love it,' the current cast member said. 'It's a very pluralistic place for comedy because it's one of the last places where you can sort of have a grab bag of different kinds of stuff.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Independent
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Christopher Walken: ‘I've been married for over 50 years. I live in a house. I'm a very normal person'
Everyone thinks they can do the Christopher Walken voice. That New York lilt. That round, honeyed purr, like a cat with plans. Try it yourself. Go on. Speak from the back of your throat. Elongate those vowels. What you shouldn't do, though, is try it in front of him. 'People come up to me in the street and they impersonate me to my face,' Walken says. 'You know, they speak the way I speak.' The actor, 81 and spry, looks knowingly down the lens of his Zoom camera. 'And I'm never sure what they're doing at first. I think, 'Why is he talking that way?' But then I realise.' He lets out an ambivalent whine. This sounds a little cruel, I tell him, while fully aware that I was speaking pure Walkenese to a colleague mere minutes before our interview. 'Oh, it happens all the time,' he sighs. Put aside the invasiveness, though, and I suppose it's a compliment. Abstruse, eerie, often impossible to pin down, Walken has existed outside of regular ol' superstardom for decades now – today he's, what, myth? A voice to be emulated. An image in a rap lyric. A dancer in a Fatboy Slim video. On-screen, he can be cool, psychotic, slippery, wise. An offbeat talker; a light mover. He's played an emperor in Dune, an ant in Antz, and murderers in many things. He was the King of New York. Few actors can say they feature in some of the greatest films of all time (Pulp Fiction; Annie Hall; The Deer Hunter) and some of the worst (Gigli; Kangaroo Jack; that one where Kevin Spacey turned into a cat). But then few are Christopher Walken. Except for on TV. Where, up until very recently, there were two. In Severance, the Apple TV+ Rubik's cube that's currently in the midst of its second, head-spinning season, employees of a mysterious biotech company have their lives split in half: one side of themselves exists in the world as we know it, with families, loved ones and hobbies; the other exists only within the walls of the workplace. Ne'er the twain shall meet – or even remember anything from the other's space. But for ostensibly platonic colleagues Burt and Irving (played with such sweet, mature longing by Walken and John Turturro, both of whom received Emmy nominations for their work in 2022), something ambiguous hangs between them – either a romantic attraction that already exists on the outside, or something they want to make real on the inside. 'John and I – we're not unlike a married couple in real life,' Walken laughs. The pair have known each other for close to four decades, first meeting at a party for the Yale Drama School sometime in the early Eighties (Turturro had just graduated; Walken was passing through). They've worked on films together, too – usually scrappy little comedies such as 1995's Search and Destroy or The Jesus Rolls, Turturro's strange quasi-sequel to The Big Lebowski from 2019. But even though Severance often keeps them apart – Burt retired at the end of season one, meaning his two lives have been reduced to one – it's the most they've worked together so far. 'We've had our ups and downs together,' Walken continues. 'And when you can finish off each other's sentences or laugh at each other's jokes, it counts for a lot when you're playing parts like these.' He smiles. 'You can tell when people like each other.' Walken is talking to me from New York, dressed in a black blazer and navy shirt, his hair grey, coiffed and tall, like he's been electrocuted. We're speaking before Christmas, our conversation taking place more or less with an Apple-branded dart blaster aimed at us: I've seen five episodes of the long-in-the-works second season at this point but have been forbidden to talk about their specifics. Today, viewers will know that Burt has been largely absent since the show's return, existing solely in the real world following his retirement. Irving, meanwhile, has been left heartbroken in the wake of discovering that Burt's 'outie' – as opposed to his workplace 'innie' – is married to a man who isn't him. They've been kept apart until this week's episode, which saw the pair finally meeting in the real world and Burt inviting Irving to eat dinner with him and his husband (a cryptic John Noble). It was a lovely reunion, albeit with strings attached. Their scenes remain some of the show's best: tender, romantic, unexpectedly, well, erotic. 'It's been different for me,' Walken says. 'Usually I'm up to no good in movies, but now I'm playing a nice, romantic person.' And gay, which is a first. Not that it's a big deal, he says. '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.' He shrugs. It's the 'nice' part that he finds most surprising. 'Because it's much more up my alley than all those other parts I've played,' he says. Meaning the psychopaths. Remember when he pushed Michelle Pfeiffer out of a high-rise window in Batman Returns, or played the Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow? And that's just two of many. 'Oh, it started way back,' he laughs. 'One of the first things I did was Annie Hall, where I played this guy who wants to drive into traffic. Then I made The Deer Hunter, where I shot myself in the head. And then I just got identified with, you know, people who are troubled… to say the least.' Deeply unlike him, he insists. 'The facts of my life are that I've been married for over 50 years, I pay my bills, and I live in a house. I'm a very normal person.' He doesn't even get upset very often. Especially when he's on set. 'It's rare to work with someone you don't like,' he explains. 'It's happened once or twice, but it's rare. Actors tend to get along. We're like a tribe, a family. Every once in a while there's somebody you'd like to push down the stairs, but…' Now there's a bit of classic Walken villainy, I tell him. 'I swear it's only ever a passing thought.' Spend just a little time with him and you find yourself wanting to crack the Walken code. Not because he's got walls up, but because no one else is really like him – he's otherworldly, surprising, a little mystical. Sean Penn once remarked that attempting to define Christopher Walken is akin to 'trying to define a cloud'. And the privacy only adds to that. He's been a pop culture staple since the Seventies, but he retains a degree of mystery. Did you know that his name's not even Christopher? 'It's a Severance kind of thing,' he laughs. 'I'm Christopher, but to a small group of people, I'm Ronnie.' Those people include his closest friends and his wife, the former casting director Georgianne Walken, whom he married in 1969. The enigmatic Ronald Walken was born in Queens, New York, to a mother and father who'd emigrated from Scotland and Germany, respectively. The facts of his biography are often so wild that they sound made up. But Walken was a child actor from the age of five, did run away to join the circus, did tame lions, and was advised to make Christopher his stage name by a nightclub dancer in the early Sixties. Theatre beckoned soon after, followed by a run of film hits in the Seventies: he played an artistic lothario in the comedy Next Stop, Greenwich Village; Diane Keaton's unhinged brother in Annie Hall; the tragic Vietnam veteran of The Deer Hunter, for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1979. The latter propelled him to leading man status. He is marvellously haunted in the 1983 Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone, as a schoolteacher struck by premonitions of the future, and a vision of paternal cruelty in the crime thriller At Close Range, released in 1986. Some of the greatest Walken roles, though, are the supporting gigs or tiny cameos that rapidly became his bread and butter: the sleazy record exec in Wayne's World 2, a sinister nightcrawler in Abel Ferrara's vampire tale The Addiction, the cranky exterminator in Mousehunt. There's a real softness to him at times, too. Look at Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can. Come for Walken as the slick, deceptive father to Leonardo DiCaprio's fledgling conman, stay for the panicked vulnerability he lets peer out as the film goes on. 'My favourite part of being an actor, really, is the time I spend by myself, learning the scripts, studying them, learning lines,' he says. 'It takes me for ever to learn lines, so to stand in my kitchen with the script is kind of as good as it gets.' Unlike Burt in Severance, Walken's not tempted by retirement himself. 'Acting is all I do,' he says. 'If I stop, what would I do? There are people who play golf, who write books. They travel, have kids and grandkids. I don't have any of that, so I go to work. But when you look at the history of movies and theatre, very few actors ever say they're done.' I tell him I can only think of Sean Connery who officially retired, packing it all in after a bad experience on a film. 'But he was a big golfer,' Walken says. 'So he had something to do.' He taps his chin, thinking. 'I don't play golf.' Directors sometimes retire, he adds. 'Quentin said somewhere that he wasn't going to make any more movies, but I hope that's not true.' He's talking about Tarantino, who pledged a few years ago to make just one more film – bringing his filmography to a total of 10 movies – before throwing in the towel. The pair go back a while, Walken reciting two of Tarantino's most famous monologues on screen, first the speech about the Sicilian mafia in True Romance – which culminates in Walken blowing Dennis Hopper's brains out – then the ludicrous, scatological backstory of a military man's gold watch in Pulp Fiction. There's an old quote from Tarantino, from around the time of True Romance, where he said he felt 'embarrassed' that Walken had spent months fastidiously learning his lines until they were note perfect. 'It was almost intimidating that such a terrific actor would take my work so seriously,' he said. Walken remembers doing much the same for his Pulp Fiction role. 'I had the speech for about four months, and I think it was eight pages long,' he says. 'And no matter what else I was doing, I would spend an hour a day going over that speech and gradually learning it. And every time I got to the end of it, it would make me laugh. Because his dialogue is all there on the page.' They were introduced by a mutual friend, the actor Harvey Keitel. 'I was staying at the Chateau Marmont at the time, and Harvey said to me, 'There's this guy you've got to meet, he's brilliant,' and he brought Quentin over. And I remember he was kind of shy and he looked about 12.' Walken hoots. 'And I thought, you know, Harvey had discovered this Orson Wellesian teenager. Anyway, he's terrific.' He's always had an eye for young talent. He bonded with Penn while filming At Close Range in 1985, and then his girlfriend at the time, a pop star supernova named Madonna. 'I spent a lot of time with her because she'd be on the set, and I liked her very much,' he says. Soon after, he attended the pair's nuptials. 'It's the only wedding I've ever been to where people were jumping out of bushes with cameras and there were helicopters flying overhead,' he laughs. 'It was also the noisiest wedding I've ever been to.' Years later, and long after she and Penn had split, Madonna called Walken up asking him to appear in one of her music videos. She had the perfect part for him to play. 'It was the Angel of Death,' Walken smiles, wry and spooky. 'Because who else?'
The Independent
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
'Saturday Night Live' stars name their favorite sketches and reflect on show's legacy
Legions of comedic talent have paraded through NBC's Studio 8H, whether as cast members, writers or hosts of 'Saturday Night Live.' As the sketch show marks its 50th anniversary with a bevy of celebrations, its cast members and alumni look back on their favorite sketches and the enduring legacy of 'Saturday Night Live.' Fred Armisen, cast member 2002-2013, one-time host FAVORITE SKETCH: 'The Wizard of Oz' 'There's a 'Wizard of Oz' one that we did that actually John Mulaney wrote, where there's like this new footage of 'Wizard of Oz,' of a character that got cut out of a movie, and it's a weather vane,' said Armisen, who played Weathervane alongside Anne Hathaway's Dorothy. 'Something about it, I just I really love that sketch.' Chloe Fineman, cast member 2019-present FAVORITE SKETCH: 'Everything is amazing,' the current cast member said, but she seemed to hope the anniversary special would see a reprise of 'The Californians.' 'All of it are sort of 'pinch me' moments and I feel like it'll be even bigger than the 40th,' she said of the upcoming special. Will Forte, cast member 2002-2010, one-time host FAVORITE SKETCHES: 'More Cowbell,' with Christopher Walken fixated on adding that signature sound to Blue Öyster Cult's 'Don't Fear the Reaper.' Forte named a few, but 'Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer' was another favorite. Then, of course, there's Adam Sandler's classic 'The Chanukah Song.' 'I hadn't seen 'The Chanukah Song' in a long time. ... It just happened to be on the other day,' said Forte, who was freshly reminded: 'It's so good.' Seth Meyers, cast member 2001-2014, former head writer, one-time host FAVORITE SKETCH: 'More Cowbell,' perhaps a universal favorite. 'I think 'Cowbell' would work if English was your like 10th language. ... I think that's a safe pick,' he said. 'It's Will Ferrell at the height of his powers. ... It's an all-time host Christopher Walken doing a thing that only Christopher Walken could do.' (Of the last 12 months, Meyers is also partial to Nate Bargatze's 'Washington's Dream' sketches.) WHY 'SNL' ENDURES: To Meyers, who now hosts 'Late Night' in Studio 8G, 'Saturday Night Live' is like sports. It's live. No one knows what's going to happen. 'It's so beautifully uneven. I've always said the worst show has something great and the best show has something terrible,' Meyers said. 'And there's no there's no host that can guarantee consistency. ... If you laid all the Alec Baldwin-hosted episodes out there, there's a huge gap between the best one and the worst one. And there's no real reason to explain that, other than just everybody sort of had a bad week.' Bobby Moynihan, cast member 2008-2017 FAVORITE SKETCHES: 'Haunted Elevator,' with Tom Hanks as the spooky-yet-goofy David S. Pumpkins; 'Calculator Christmas Gift,' where Fred Armisen and John Malkovich have their odd holiday wish list fulfilled; 'Tennis Talk with Time-Traveling Scott Joplin,' which is somehow exactly what it sounds like. 'David Pumpkins always comes to mind as just, like, the weirdest thing we ever got on. And I love the idea of future generations trying to figure it out, as well,' said Moynihan, who added that he was drawn to 'amazing, weird sketches.' John Mulaney, writer 2008-2013, six-time host FAVORITE SKETCHES: 'Toilet Death Ejector,' an infomercial flogging an 'elegant' solution to avert the indignity of dying on the commode, and 'Monkey Trial,' featuring, yes, a monkey but not one on trial — one presiding over it. 'Those are two quality Simon Rich premises executed,' said Mulaney, who wrote the former with frequent collaborators Rich and Marika Sawyer and the latter with Rich. Both sketches date to Mulaney's hosting stints. Laraine Newman, cast member 1975-1980 FAVORITE SKETCH: 'Plato's Cave' from the Not Ready for Prime Time Players era, where Steve Martin plays a beatnik, and 'The Swan,' a parody of a 2000s reality show. 'I remember seeing there was a horrible reality show called 'The Swan' where they did this massive plastic surgery on people. And I think they did a parody of that with Amy Poehler and a bunch of other people. And it was the first time I'd seen her and I was like, 'My God, this girl is so good,'' Newman said. 'But as far as our show, I think that this one sketch called 'Plato's Cave' or the beatnik sketch, is, I think, a really good representation of our show. And it's the whole cast.' WHY 'SNL' ENDURES: There's a long list of people responsible, she says, but atop that list? Show creator Lorne Michaels. 'The fact that the show has remained relevant is because of the approach that Lorne has, which is that he always has new people, whether they be writers or performers with new perspectives and original ideas and characters,' Newman said. 'And that's, I think, what moves the show along in terms of tone and relevance.' Jason Sudeikis, writer 2003-2005, cast member 2005-2013, one-time host FAVORITE SKETCH: 'What's Up With That?' a recurring series with Kenan Thompson as a game show host. 'Part of the reason I put it in there is because I feel very proud of the group, the generation I came up on and through the show ... both on camera and behind the scenes,' Sudeikis said, noting the 'real wild' cameos like Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Kenan Thompson, cast member 2003-present WHY 'SNL' ENDURES: It has good people, and they know where the line is. 'We work with brilliant people. I think we all have a pretty solid sensibility, where we kind of know where the offense is and we work really hard trying not to tread in places that are uncomfortable or whatever without warrant,' the longtime cast member said. 'But at the same time, I can't please everybody and we're still trying to like, like lighten the mood, if you will. So, you know, we're doing that as long as we're not like overly stepping — like if you step on a toe, you say, 'I'm sorry. Excuse me.' Then that should be OK. ... We should be able to just move on and continue to explore or continue conversations that may or may not be uncomfortable. That's kind of our job.' Bowen Yang, writer 2018-2019, cast member 2019-present WHY 'SNL' ENDURES: At its heart, it's a variety show. 'I think with a show like 'SNL,' we have the latitude to be a little variety show and give you different sensibilities and different parts of that, different perspectives. I love it,' the current cast member said. 'It's a very pluralistic place for comedy because it's one of the last places where you can sort of have a grab bag of different kinds of stuff.' ___
