“I play a lot of strange people. I’d like to play up. You know, a solid citizen, very normal guy. Normal guy, maybe a doctor,” he told Rolling Stone in a recent interview. And while this may seem like a pretty dramatic turn for a guy whose most famous monologue involves hiding a watch in his ass for two years, the writing has actually been on the wall for a very long time. When The Guardian asked the actor what irritated him in 2013, he responded: “Quite often, I’ll be sent a script for a movie… and I find that I like it, so I say I’ll do it. But then they rewrite it for me. They make it quirky. Odd. I find that rather annoying. I call it Walkenising.” In a Super Bowl commercial this year, he also poked fun at the whole phenomenon by rolling his eyes when people he encountered on the street tried and failed to do “the voice.”
While the humble mailman or barber may still be out of reach, Walken did at least get to play a far more subdued version of his usual schtick in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two. We’d even go as far as to call the character “normal” except for the tiny little fact that he’s an intergalactic emperor presiding over a desert planet inhabited by murder worms with giant teeth. C’est la vie.
Even so, the role gave Walken the rare opportunity to let everyone else do the acting around him. When asked how he approached his part, he answered: “When I was young, I had to play a king in something and an older actor said to me, ‘You know, don’t worry about it. Let the director tell everybody to treat you like a king, and then you don’t really have to do much.’ So I started counting on that, the trappings of the king and his courts.” In the meantime, Dune: Part Two co-star Austin Butler’s total commitment to gonzo insanity and—most importantly—using a silly voice all the time makes him an incredibly strong candidate to take over the goofy actor crown when Walken finally gets to transition into being a normal guy for good.
