LAUGH MERCHANT
CHRISTOPHER WALKEN MAKES HIS SMALLSCREEN DEBUT IN STEPHEN MERCHANT’S NEW COMEDY THE OUTLAWS. BY
HE’S been a Bond villain, played Russian roulette with Robert De Niro and danced his way to a Grammy in a Fatboy Slim video but somehow Christopher Walken has never starred in a television series, let alone one shot in a warehouse in Bristol.
I watch in slight bemusement as he goes through the gears during a scene in Stephen Merchant’s (below) six-part comedy drama The Outlaws, arguing over the contents of a duffel bag with Bafta-winning sitcom regular Darren Boyd and former EastEnders star Clare Perkins. How on earth did this happen?
‘I used to enjoy going on an airplane,’ says the 78-year-old over Zoom, taking time out from learning lines and watching daytime telly (Frasier, Judge Judy and Traffic Cops) while quarantining in Bristol. ‘These days I’m more inclined to take jobs someplace I can drive to but Bristol is beautiful, these are terrific actors and Stephen writes terrific dialogue. Doing this as long as I have, you can spot that pretty quickly. He came to my house, we sat and talked, and that’s how it happened.’
Walken plays small-time conman Frank, one of seven minor criminals thrown together for several weeks of community service. Alongside him are Boyd’s uptight suit, Perkins’ ageing activist, Eleanor Tomlinson’s troubled socialite, Gamba
Cole’s estate kid, Rhianne Barreto’s shoplifting boffin and Merchant’s sadsack lawyer.
Unexpectedly, there’s a thread from The Outlaws that goes all the way back to his breakthrough sitcom.
‘We made a comment in The
Office that often the only thing you have in common with co-workers is the carpet you walk around on, yet you spend more time with them than your family,’ Merchant explains on set. ‘With any kind of writing, you’re looking for reasons to bring completely arbitrary groups of people together and this is similar to that or even to acting, where you’re thrown together and friendships are forged in fire.’
It was also forged in adolescence, when his mother’s stories of working as a community service supervisor began to intrigue him.
‘She was responsible for checking the offenders were doing their jobs,’ he says. ‘Kids I was at school with would occasionally come through the door: “Oh, hi, Geoff, you been nicking TVs again?” Businessmen, teachers, students, kids, they all had to paint a shed or pick up rubbish together. It seeded away in my mind.’
That relatability extends to Walken’s character. He saw plenty of Franks growing up in New York, and the actor suggests the similarities run even deeper than that.
‘As far as I’m, concerned, Frank is just like me,’ he laughs. ‘He looks like me, he doesn’t always tell the truth… In order to get through life, I suppose you have to do a bit of tap dancing, and I’ve done that literally and figuratively. Being amusing is a big point.’
Back on set, as he corpses his co-stars with another eccentric turn of phrase, it looks like Bristol is the right place for Christopher Walken
after all.