A biography for Christopher Walkenhasn’t been written yet.
“I'm in a place in my life where I get offered parts that I didn't get offered before - fathers and uncles and grandfathers and so on. And it took me a long time to get to that place, but I'm glad because it opens up new territory.”
“It's what actors call a big, juicy part, when you're a leading man. I don't get a lot of those. I get a lot of supporting things.”
“My background is in musical comedy. I didn't know I was going to be an actor. But all my points of reference have to do with musical comedy and in being kind of a showoff.”
“People think that my favorite roles to do are villains, but I find comedy to be the most challenging and rewarding.”
“I think that weddings have probably been crashed since the beginning of time. Cavemen crashed them. You go to meet girls. It makes sense.”
“When videotape came so a lot of movies that I do have a kind of afterlife in video. Things where movies that I do would come and go; they still come and go but you can go rent them and see them on TV.”
“One thing that's happened to me is I've been around a long time and I've played a lot of villains and so forth. I think it had to do with, well one thing is that I looked younger than I was for a long time. Now I think I'm suddenly starting to play people's father.”
“I've always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre, and that's really where my training is.”
“Acting has to do with saying it as if you meant it, so for me the words are always very important. It's very important for me to know my lines, know them so well that I don't have to think about them.”
“Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.”
“My life is really quite conservative. I've been married nearly 50 years. I don't have hobbies or children. I don't much care to travel. I've never had a big social life. I really just stay home, except when I go to work.”
“I always like to watch comics and it's interesting that you can tell if someone's funny in 10 seconds.”
“Also, I think there are huge reactions sometimes, which are also mysterious.”
“I've made movies that we're very successful that we're a complete surprise, and I've made movies that I thought we're going to be very successful that, you know.”
“I come from a part of New York that was almost entirely immigrants. I was born in America, but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe.”
“Early on, I played one or two disturbed people, and I guess I must have been good at it, because it stuck. But, you know, I'm a regular guy. I stay home a lot, I make an effort to keep a distance from the whole social thing, the openings, the parties. I try to live in a calm way.”
“Somebody said to me that I speak English almost like somebody for whom English is not their first language.”
“Improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing. That's a kind of paradoxical thing about improvising.”
“As an actor you become that lighting rod between the person who made the play and the audience.”
“The minute I start to talk about acting, I realize that I can't. You know, it's an abstract thing, a little bit mysterious even if you do it for a living.”