How much is Christopher Walken worth?
| Net Worth: | $35 Million |
|---|---|
| Profession: | Professional Actor |
| Date of Birth: | March 31, 1943 (age 79) |
| Country: | United States of America |
| Height: | 6 ft (1.83 m) |
About Christopher Walken
Christopher Walken born Ronald Walken on March 31, 1943 is an American actor, comedian, and singer with an estimated net worth of $35 million. Christopher Walken is an actor who rose to fame in the 1970s with dramatic roles in classics movies such as The Deer Hunter and Woody Allen’s masterpiece, Annie Hall.
As Walken has never once been type cast to any specific kind of role, the celebrated performer’s acting choices are as unpredictable as British weather. The actor is well known for his unique facial features and, in particular, his fascinating and completely original dialect. This has helped him score numerous roles over his fifty year career, and he has become Hollywood royalty, starring in over 100 movies in total.
It was the late 1970s when the world was first introduced to Christopher Walken, as he starred in one of the most acclaimed Vietnam war movies of all time, The Deer Hunter.
In the movie, Walken was a young baby-faced actor, but still had that distinctive cadence to his voice, which was a standout of the movie. The actor played Nick, who was tortured by the Viet Cong and forced to play Russian Roulette in the middle of the jungle. The Deer Hunter is a heartbreaking and viscerally shocking movie, being entirely miserable and emotionally exhausting, but Walken’s role was vibrant and layered, and his performance in the film earned him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in the year of its release.
Walken is well-known for being quite the oddball, and this is because of the strange roles he often plays. For instance, in the seminal Pulp Fiction, the actor played a war veteran who has a five minute monologue about hiding a watch up his ass for six months, and that’s the only scene he has in the whole movie. With that being one of the more memorable scenes of the film, it introduced a new generation of cinema-goers to the actor as the movie made over $210 million worldwide.
In James Bond Walken appeared as Max Zorin in A View to a Kill (1985).
Walken has starred in another Tarantino project a year before he appeared in Pulp Fiction , True Romance. He played the role a Sicilian consigliere called Vincenzo Coccotti, working for a local Detroit mobster “Blue” Lou Boyle.
Most surprising of all is that Walken is possibly most famous not for his iconic roles in movies of the past 40+ years, but for performing in the music video Weapon of Choice by Fatboy Slim. The song has millions of views on YouTube and is known for its bizarre nature due to Walken’s dancing, the questionably empty hotel building, and Walken’s random ability to fly be the end of the video.
Its ambiguity is why the video is so beloved by both Fatboy Slim fans and Walken fans alike. And Walken’s dance moves in the video have been mimicked to no end. There are other strange performances Walken has taken part in outside of movies too, things that come off as almost performance art.
In the 1990s, he featured on The Jonathan Ross Show where he read The Three Little Pigs in his own boom-bap manner.
There are other movies that Walken has starred in that often circulate many best movies of all time lists, including Catch Me If You Can, a movie directed by the celebrated Steven Spielberg about the real life fraudster and now FBI agent, Frank Abagnale. Walken was again nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role of Abagnale’s father.
Walken has been in a hell of a lot of films, and it isn’t because he falls in love with the scripts. It is well documented that the actor accepts almost anything just so long as he likes the character and it pays well. This is why the goofy talking actor has starred in movies such as Kangaroo Jack, Joe Dirt, Gigli, Click, and more. This list goes on and on. He has starred in roughly three movies per year on average, and the actor peaked in 2002 when he starred in five movies that year.
The most successful of all of them was Catch Me If You Can, the Steven Spielberg directed, Leonardo DiCapri starring smash hit, which went on to make $352.1 million. However likely the best known among movie buffs is his role of Captain Koons in the Quentin Tarantino cult classic, Pulp Fiction.
A quick look at Walken’s box office success is all it takes to understand how many millions of dollars the actor has made. Man on Fire made $130.3 million, Wedding Crashes made $288.5 million, and Click, the Adam Sandler comedy, made of $240.7 million. The biggest box office success was with The Jungle Book, which was just short of reaching a worldwide gross of one billion dollars.
Christopher Walken’s films have grossed more than $1 billion in the United States alone.
Working as a lion tamer will teach you a thing or two about life. So will working in a circus. But that’s how Christopher Walken spent his teenage years and it must have helped, because he was consistently appearing in movies soon after. Walken first appeared on TV at the age of 10 and his consistency has been key I think to his success.
Of course, consistency without the aptitude to perform doesn’t get you very far. But because this is what Walken has wanted to do, he has trained accordingly. Likely mastering his vocals by himself in the bathroom mirror developing his iconic sound.
A year hasn’t gone by without Walken starring or featuring in a movie for almost 40 years. The last time Walken didn’t appear in any movie of a given year was in 1984. It might be the pay checks that keep pulling him in for another round, but it’s the love of the artistry that makes him stay.
Along with his mad work ethic, he wouldn’t be offered as much work as he is without that strange but charming voice that people have relentlessly imitated for years.
“Laurence Olivier said in an interview once that when he plays a tragedy he always aims for the funny parts, and the other way around. Because in a comedy you look for what’s serious. I think that’s true. Sometimes things are really funny if you’re absolutely earnest. If you’re really serious, it’s hilarious.” Christopher Walken
Because of his magnificent voice, it’s surprising that the actor hasn’t scored more animated roles, as for that kind of work, actors need an animated and exaggerated voice. However, those vocal chords of his did score him the part of King Louie in Jon Favreau’s remake of The Jungle Book. The actor played a gangsterised version of the orangutan, and though the movie received middling scores from critics, they praised Walken’s take on the classic character as the best part, and he was a big reason as to why the movie was a resounding success.
Summing-Up
Thanks to his dedication to strange roles and being blessed with a magnetic voice, Walken has led people’s own perception of himself with such specificity and has become his own established brand. Because of this, Christopher Walken has a massive net worth estimated to be $35 million.
“Emotional power is maybe the most valuable thing that an actor can have.” Christopher Walken
