Why I Love... Christopher Walken

There aren't many actors out there who could put the willies up you just by looking at you, but Christopher Walken is certainly one of the esteemed few - once he has his icy cold death stare fixed on you, you'd best start preparing your funeral arrangements. So powerful is the man's gaze, he can heal a scab just by glaring at it - legend has it, he can fire lasers out of his eyes when he gets in a vendetta kind of mood. But behind those enigmatic peepers lies one of the most versatile character actors in the business; whether he's playing a part-eggplant Sicilian gangster, an anally disgruntled Vietnam vet or a headless horseman, Christopher Walken will always, always steal your movie from right under your nose and dance away into the sunset.

Just to look at him is to understand his appeal. Skinny and wiry, with an angled face that's probably sharp to the touch (he almost looks like a human version of Kryten), Walken gives off an air of intimidation as soon as he enters the picture - if there's ever call for a live action Mr. Burns, here's your guy. Christ, just imagine visiting your girlfriend's house for the first time and finding out Chris was her father - you'd be so terrified, you'd be scared to touch a pair of breasts until you were 40. However, if you think he looks scary, you should hear him talk. With a slow, staccato speech pattern and an apparent disregard for punctuation, the words of Walken are fired from his mouth with no recognisable cadence, each word sounding like it might be the end of the sentence, until BAM - he hits you with another. You only know he's finished talking when he starts staring at you and you feel the hairs trying to detach themselves from the back of your neck. He might speak with all the regularity of a possessed metronome, but you'll still find yourself hanging on his every word, several feet closer to the screen than you were before he started.

Looking through his past movies, you'll find classics like The Dead Zone, The Deer Hunter (for which he won an Oscar), Annie Hall and Wayne's World 2. Okay, maybe that last one isn't exactly a classic, but even when he's appearing in sub-par films, he's absolutely always the best thing in them. Compare his foray into comedy with, say, Robert De Niro, and while the latter looks like he's purposely straining his comedic muscles to hit every line just right, Christopher Walken looks like he couldn't give a shit if you're laughing or not. "I make movies that nobody will see. I've made movies that even I have never seen," he claims. This is why Walken transcends coolness; he makes everything look effortless, whether it's drama, comedy or dancing. If you've seen the video to Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice, you'll have seen him dressed up to the nines, showing off his dancing credentials, tripping the light fantastic to Brighton's finest through a hotel lobby, with not a care in the world. Can De Niro do that? Even if he could, would he? It'd be like watching a drunken elderly relative trying to do the Macarena at a family wedding.

This is a message to all film directors out there in movie land: forget who you were about to hire and hire Christopher Walken instead. Even better, just give him a call and tell him to hang around the film set and have him intimidate your lead actor - pretty soon, the poor sod will get so spooked he'll quit, and most probably leave the country to boot. When the makers of Bond movie A View To A Kill came to filling the role of super-villain Max Zorin, the script called for a man of Sting's appearance. Who is the more terrifying - an eco-whinger who can stay up his wife for a few days, or a silver-haired nutjob who used to be a lion tamer and looks like he might be concocting his own plan to take over the world in his spare time? It's not rocket science - every film would be better with Christopher Walken in it. You want an example? Batman Returns was brilliant. Batman & Robin was rubbish. Indisputable evidence.

Incredibly, there are still people out there who don't appreciate his godliness. A few years back, he pitched an idea to some television executives - his very own cooking show, where he'd whip up an amazing meal before our eyes while sharing countless anecdotes with his equally cool celebrity friends. Amazingly, they had the balls to turn him down, the studios apparently favouring intelligence vacuums like Who Wants to Marry a Convicted Child Rapist? and Dudes Barfing on Each Other 6. Come now, this is a man that could make peeling a potato sexy and could make cracking eggs seem like the apocalypse - it'd be like a hyper violent version of Ready Steady Cook, only one where the audience are too frightened to vote anything but Green Peppers every week. Alas, we have to make do with the Top 100 Haircuts instead. TV sucks.

Assured, classy and stone cold cool, Christopher Walken embodies everything that is great about modern cinema - frankly I'd rather pay to watch him reading the ingredients off the back of a packet of Pop Tarts than watch half of the crap that's crudding up my local cinema screen at the moment. If there's a movie out there that he's in and that isn't worth seeing, I haven't come across it yet. Even if I did, I'd never tell him - the man would burn a hole through my face with his ocular superpowers before dancing on my grave until his pasta was ready. Just imagine how Star Wars would have panned out if Lucas had hired Walken as Han Solo instead of Harrison Ford, as was intended. One thing's for certain - there's no way Greedo would have got the jump on our Chris. Ali