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.
