In Martin McDonagh’s perverse comedy A Behanding in Spokane, Christopher Walken plays a psychotic one-handed man in pursuit of the appendage he lost 47 years earlier, and it’s as weird a performance as one could hope. But it gets even better. Vulture has learned that Walken intends to bring some of his character’s massive collection of “human†hands home with him. “I have a room in my house where I keep souvenirs, and maybe they’ll give me a hand to put in there,†he said at the play’s opening-night party.
But which ones? There are children’s hands, hands with tattoos … “They’re all great!†he said, then launched into a theory about why the decades-old hands are rubbery and bounce when thrown, instead of being petrified. “Well, [my character] keeps them full of blood. He keeps them lubricated,†said Walken. This isn’t part of the script, but Walken said he’d thought long and hard about such things. As for his racist character’s tendency to toss around the N-word, Walken said he had qualms about it at first, but has since gotten over them. “You know, the thing about the play is that everybody is, essentially, when you get down to it, they’re all nice people,†he said. “And the language, I think, kind of gets wiped out by the fact that they’re nice people.†(Trust us: See the play, and this statement will seem even weirder than it does right now.)
But just in case you thought Christopher Walken was just being weird in our interview, Anthony Anderson had a little tale to tell about working with him on the set of Kangaroo Jack. (Yes, Christopher Walken was in Kangaroo Jack.) According to Anderson, Walken walked around the set with a microcassette recorder, “and he would just fart into the microcassette.†“And then during our close-ups, he would play his farts while we were onscreen, to break Jerry O’Connell and myself. It worked. It’s hard to keep a straight face when you’re listening to Christopher Walken’s flatulence on a soundstage in Australia.†Asked to confirm, Walken replied, “That is not not-true.â€