He’s the go-to actor when it comes to menace, but does the new Jungle Book’s King Louie have a softer side?

The hair is as wild as a brushfire, but everything else about Christopher Walken is softer, friendlier, more amused than anticipated – a domestic cat to the killer of his onscreen persona. At his house, in a town in rural Connecticut two hours north of Manhattan, he puts on the coffee while Georgianne, his wife of 48 years, laments the journey I’ve made out of the city. Walken turned 73 this year and walks a little stiffly, but his cat-like blue eyes dart with undimmed vigour. He has, over the last 50 years, made more than 100 films, some terrible, some great, and when asked about any of them merely indicates his surroundings – the oriental rugs, the beautiful flagstone flooring, the extensive grounds with its trees and barn – and remarks, “I have a nice house.” His dry smile does the rest.

Actually, what he says is, “I have. A nice house.” If one were accurately to punctuate Walken’s speech, a typical sentence would look like something written by David Mamet on a rough day. Walken calls this a result of having grown up in Queens, New York, among people for whom English was a second language, including his German father (his mother was from Glasgow). This may sound too cute to be true, but is stylistically of a piece with his ponderous, unflappable manner and what appears to be his perpetual state of amused incredulity.

In any case, it is fun waiting to see how a Walken sentence will turn out. When I ask how he prepared for his role in Jon Favreau’s new film of The Jungle Book, in which Walken plays King Louie, he says, “In this case, there were songs. So I had to learn them. They sent me a – DVD. So I was walking around the house. You know. Singing it.”

Can he sing?

“Not much.”

The movie, which co-stars Bill Murray as Baloo and Idris Elba as Shere Khan, was fun to the extent that it got Walken out of the house, and he liked hanging out with Murray (“I don’t really know him”), but don’t expect anything more effusive than that. For as long as Walken has been acting, his career decisions have always boiled down to this: “I just take the next best thing. That’s my criteria.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Annie Hall with Diane Keaton, 1977. Photograph: LMK

His modesty is a kind of tough-guy act, a lack of vanity so aggressive it makes him almost wholly resistant to criticism. It is also, correctly, calculated to charm. Walken has more experience of pre-fame life than many of his peers – he was 35 when he made The Deer Hunter, his breakthrough role, prior to which he had never made more than $11,000 a year from acting, including one dreadful period when he was out of work for two straight years. Compared to this, anything that happens in the course of these, his successful years, is small potatoes.

Which isn’t to say the job doesn’t occasionally terrify him. Before The Jungle Book, Walken’s most recent public appearance in the US was as Captain Hook in the NBC live production of Peter Pan (Allison Williams, from the TV show Girls, was in the title role), an absurd juggernaut which Walken describes as less an acting job and “more like a stunt. A daredevil thing. Jumping over trucks in a motorcycle.”

Performing in three-and-a-half hours of live TV sounds like most people’s idea of a nightmare, I suggest.

“Well. You’re right. They rehearsed it like a play, a musical. I didn’t really understand what was going on until a couple of days before we did it. The idea that it was live. And that it was costumes and people flying – the logistics of it were amazing. I’ve never done anything like that. And. You really do have to have a big dose of luck. And not only that, but it’s a classic. Everybody has their favourite Peter Pan.”

The production as a whole invited a certain amount of mockery, and the New York Times, in a mostly kind review, said of Walken, “his voice was faint and he seemed at times to be rummaging for the next line”.

“I didn’t go into that,” he says. “I don’t have a computer. I don’t check stuff.”

You don’t have a computer?

“My wife has one. I don’t have a cell phone.”

How does your agent get in touch with you?

“They call the house.”

On the landline?

“Yeah.” There is an extremely long pause. “And I have a fax machine.”

***

If Christopher Walken had been born 40 years earlier, there is a good chance he would have been a much bigger and more mainstream movie star. By his own assessment he is best suited to musicals, a brilliant dancer whose turn in the Fatboy Slim video, Weapon Of Choice, 16 years ago, is still the defining image many of us have of him. If he isn’t much of a singer (but then, neither was Gene Kelly) he has the languid charm of an old-school MGM hero.

Languor, it turns out, also lends itself to playing psychopaths. One of Walken’s first successful roles was as Duane, Diane Keaton’s unnerving brother in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, setting the stage for the rest of his career. It sometimes baffles him that he is perceived as a bogeyman by millions of movie-goers, although he allows that something about his appearance is suggestive of villainy. “I don’t need to be made to look evil,” he once famously said. “I can do that on my own.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest As Nick in The Deer Hunter. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Looking at him now, avuncular in the sunroom, one can squint and still see it, a deadpan look around the eyes; a certain baldness of expression that suggests the churn of human emotion is a far-distant thing. Walken has exaggerated this look to great effect in psychotic roles such as Captain Koons in Pulp Fiction, Max Schreck in Batman Returns and Vincenzo Coccotti in True Romance. Sometimes he sends himself up, as with his role as the Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow. At other times, as with Nick Chevotarevich in The Deer Hunter, he acts with great psychological realism.

Walken likes to say he doesn’t do anything much to get into role and he has an obvious disdain for the pretentious end of his profession. (“No matter what character I’m playing, it’s me,” he has said.) Then again, he has also said that if there is a way into a script, it is through the rhythm of the words. But what happens when a script is so bad there is no rhythm?

“Yeah,” he says. “There’s a lot of bad scripts. You just try to – I do the same thing with all scripts; I just read it over and over. And occasionally I’ll say to [the director] I just don’t want to say that. And then you figure it out. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve made movies that have had very sketchy scripts, and everybody recognised that. And if you have very good actors, and they play together, it can be OK.”

Give me an example.

“I made a movie called the King Of New York, where they had good actors [David Caruso and Laurence Fishburne co-starred] and they would say we worked our dialogue out amongst ourselves. And it worked out fine. And then sometimes it doesn’t work.” In which case, he says, the movie might never appear. “Even on DVD.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dancing in Fatboy Slim’s video Weapon Of Choice. Photograph: PA

If Walken is sanguine about these failures, it is because he has been acting for so long it is less a career to him than a background condition. His mother, he says, was “a fan”. She read the movie magazines. His father ran a bakery in Astoria, Queens – seven days a week, dawn till dusk, a taciturn, hardworking man with no great interest in his wife’s plans for his sons.

Walken was called Ronnie, then, and still is, by his wife and family; he adopted the name Christopher years later, on a whim. It was his mother who enrolled Walken and his two brothers in dance class, dragged them into the city and put them up for parts in live TV shows. “They used a lot of kids. All the programmes were very family-oriented. My mother knew that, and we’d get on the train and go to Manhattan.” I assume he was too young to be scared?

“Oh no, I was terrified!” Walken grows suddenly animated. “If I was given a line, I would usually forget it.”

At the weekend, he helped his father in the bakery, and “when I got my driver’s licence, I delivered cakes”. Walken is a rough contemporary of Donald Trump, also from Queens – although Trump is from Jamaica Estates, a much posher neighbourhood than immigrant Astoria. I wonder what Walken sees when he regards Trump; something the rest of us don’t, perhaps. “His speech pattern is very much that particular part of New York,” he says. “I never met him as a kid, but he could’ve been one of those kids that I grew up with.”

Always hustling?

“Sure. Even the hair. He’s recognisable to me. I hope that Hillary Clinton is the next president. When I watch the Republicans, I don’t know how they ever – I’ve never seen such a group. Now they’re yelling at each other about their wives? It’s crazy. It’s high school. ‘Little Marco and Lyin’ Ted?’ ‘You’re a bully!’ It’s not even high school. It’s like seven-year-olds.”

After Walken himself graduated from high school, he started college, but dropped out after the first year to appear in an off-Broadway play. He won’t admit to having any particular role models, or being motivated by much in the way of self-belief.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With his wife, Georgianne. Photograph: Matteo Prandoni/BF ANYC.com/Rex/Shutterstock

“I never did think I was good at it. I just thought that it was the only thing I knew anything about. And I was in musicals. I’d been dancing my whole life, so I graduated to the chorus of a musical, and then someone said, they’re auditioning for this play, and I went, and I got that. It’s always been a bit of an accident. I’ve never been much good at making opportunities, but I’m pretty good at seizing them.”

Why does he think that is?

“Just being kind of nervy, I think. And saying, I don’t know how to do that, but I’ll go do it anyway. Somebody once said that life has to do with showing up. Being afraid is fine. But go up anyway.”

Does he believe in the philosophy of saying yes to everything?

“You can’t say yes to everything. But I have an old friend, an older actor, who used to say to me: ‘Be brave.’”

What he is describing is surely an expression of self-confidence, but Walken says it’s more finely calibrated than that. “I’m confident in my predilection – I don’t know what that word is – to engage. To say, just go ahead and do that. And you know, I’ve made a lot of mistakes and fallen down, and I’ve been lousy in lots of things. But I’m not sorry that I did them, because I made a living and I have a nice house and I stayed busy. There’s a certain discipline that goes with taking a job. Whereas, if I sat around and ate ice-cream, nothing happens.”

Work begets work?

“Yes. And you learn something. And also the business that I’m in, if I miss the mark, there are no particular consequences. You get a bad review, or people tell you you weren’t very good in that? Well, all right. But I did it. I had to do it.”

***

Walken met Georgianne on a touring production of West Side Story in 1963. He played Riff, one of the gang members, and she played his girlfriend. They married a few years later, when he was 25, and got an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

For the next 10 years, Walken slogged around the city, attending auditions and taking bit parts in plays and the occasional movie. If it was grim, he didn’t notice, he says, because he has always known “how to live well”. Even during those two years when he was claiming unemployment cheques, they enjoyed a good life on a tiny income – impossible in today’s New York. “You’d go to Safeway on Columbus Avenue and buy a big bag of chicken thighs. And I’d get a jug of Gallo red burgundy and mix it with juice and we’d have sangria. We lived simply, but we lived well.”

Somebody said that children are a miracle. It never happened for us. We never talk about it

When he was about 30, he walked into the Public Theatre and asked to speak to Joe Papp, its legendary founder and director. “And I said to him, you know, I can’t get arrested. He said, don’t worry, I’m going to put you in three plays. You’re OK for the next six months. And that’s what happened.” True to his word, Papp put Walken in three productions and he enjoyed his longest spell in employment for years.

Weren’t you demoralised during those long stretches of unemployment?

“But I was busy. I would be doing workshops, I was a regular at the Actors Studio. They always had something for you to do. I’d be in some off-Broadway thing. Readings. Not to mention just trudging around going to auditions. I may have been working harder than I was when I actually had work.”

But of course, he wasn’t making any money. When someone told him to go and audition for a film called The Deer Hunter, a movie set in the Vietnam war, Walken turned up as usual with no great hopes nor any idea that being cast as a young soldier, brutalised to the point of insanity in a film co-starring Meryl Streep, would change his life. He won the 1979 Oscar for best supporting actor, and then the wild years began.

“And it was a wonderful thing,” he says. “I started to get good parts. To get paid better. But it never was massive. I never had paparazzi chasing me.”

Walken became a habitual party-goer at Studio 54. “I lived in New York. I was out and about.”

Did you feel yourself becoming a jerk?

“Absolutely. I’ve spent a lot of time being a jerk.”

Weren’t you already married by then?

“Sure. I was married when I was 25. But we lived in New York and I was – sure. I was very socially active. Partying.” He says, “But after a while you can’t do that any more. If you’re lucky, anyway. I think some time in my late 40s, I thought, well, you have to be taking care of yourself now.” By then, Georgianne had progressed beyond acting and dancing to a highly successful career as a casting agent; she would, ultimately, be the casting director responsible for shows such as The Sopranos and Entourage. And so the couple moved out to Connecticut, to a beautiful old house at the end of a long private driveway, where the loudest noise in the neighbourhood is the birds.

What’s curious, is that Walken, for all his bravado about failure and success, has always been terrified of a wide range of quotidian things – driving, swimming, horses – to the point almost of phobia. “I don’t mind dangerous psychic things,” he says. “But dangerous physical things are – I don’t even go into crowds. I don’t go to the airport.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Every birthday’s a big thing.’ Photograph: Benedict Evans for the Guardian. Grooming: Jessica Ortiz at the Wall Group

He won’t drive any farther than the local newsagent on a Sunday. He will only fly for work when it is absolutely unavoidable. And he would never live in LA, because of the dangers of the freeway. Walken puts all this down to having grown up in New York. “You know, if people grow up in big cities, they don’t do a lot of things. I can’t drive in traffic – I get very nervous. I can’t really play any games. I can’t swim. People who grow up in New York City don’t really play baseball. There’s no place to do it. So you learn to tap dance.”

But it must be more than that; plenty of native New Yorkers don’t have a breakdown at the prospect of driving on the freeway. You might call it a manifestation of control-freakery – the fear of being in anything that someone else is in charge of – except Walken says it’s the opposite. He is, if anything, not controlling enough.

“I have a lack of control. The times I’ve had to be on a horse, I’ve always been told, ‘You’ve got to take control of the horse. The horse can feel your authority.’ Forget about it. The horse had no respect for me. They always run away with me.”

He has made a lot of westerns, none of which have been happy experiences. In Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, Walken had to ride a horse practically every day for eight months. “The horse never got to like me,” he says. In A View To A Kill, the James Bond movie in which he played the classic Bond villain, Max Zorin, “you see me racing on a horse. That was a stuffed horse. On a trolley. With tyres. And they towed it behind a truck.”

The Jungle Book review – spectacular revival of Disney's family favourite Read more

One imagines that, given Walken’s predilection to dwell on his own self-destruction, growing older may not have been easy.

“Yes! Every birthday’s a big thing. There’s a certain shock to it. I’m in here, and then I’ll see a picture of myself and, you know, I’m old. And stuff happens. My hands get sore.”

It would surely be harder without the hair.

“The hair helps. And also I think that I have pretty good genes.” His mother died at 104 and his father at almost 100. Did Walken ever think about passing his genes on?

“It never happened. Somebody once said that children are a miracle. I think that’s true. Not everybody has them.”

There is a long pause.

“I don’t mind. My brothers have kids. I’ve always had kids around. And my wife, frankly – we never talk about it – but I notice she dotes a bit on my nephews and nieces. She’s always buying them stuff. She’s a little bit of a hen about the kids. Yeah.”

When he looks back on his own childhood, he sees the foundations of a good life. Unlike some children of stage mothers, Walken is grateful his mother pushed him along, because, “What else would I have done?” His father remained something of an enigma, a Walken trait by all accounts.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The official Jungle Book trailer

He tells me a story that sums up his father’s unflashy fortitude, something Walken admires and might be said to have emulated. “My father was of a generation where everybody smoked,” he says. “He smoked in the bakery – there were no laws then. I’ll never forget, one day my brother said to me, ‘Have you noticed that the ashtrays in the house are empty?’ And over the next few days I looked, because there were always butts. And the ashtrays were clean. And I was watching him and he wasn’t smoking. And he never said a word, he just quit. Nobody ever brought it up. Just one day, he stopped smoking.”

And that was in character?

“Yes. He was very quiet. He never said much. He worked very hard. He would never announce anything.”

Over-analysing is not Walken’s style, either. When asked why his marriage has lasted so long, he says, “lucky”, and knocks on wood. “Luck is a very important thing.”

He doesn’t go into the city very often these days, but when he does, he is always recognised on the street and is rather nostalgic for the era when people merely asked for his autograph. Now, they throw their arms around him and demand a photograph. He thinks about this for a moment then says slowly, “Selfies.”

It must be burdensome, I suggest, because he is obliged to smile, a remark Walken greets with the driest twitch of the mouth and a wintry look in the eyes.

“Or something,” he says.

• The Jungle Book is out now.