When we meet Christopher Walken’s character on Prime Video’s endearing new British comedy series The Outlaws, he is at the front door—greeting his daughter (Dolly Wells), teenage grandson (Guillermo Bedward), and granddaughter (Isla Gie), after an eight-year estrangement. The reunion isn’t motivated by love or affection, but criminal punishment. Walken’s playing a longtime con—“a lying, thieving, selfish old bastard who can never be trusted,” his daughter warns her children—who needs a permanent residence where he can be placed under house arrest.

Walken has spent decades playing sociopaths, murderers, mobsters, and villains that give great monologues. Maybe it’s his cold blue eyes or the threatening whisper, or the fact that he doesn’t seem like a hugger. Even in other countries, though, he’s associated with his movie bad guys. During a recent phone call, Walken recalls a long-ago trip to the Sicilian countryside where a child of about six years old pointed at him and called him “Max”—as in Max Shreck, the Batman Returns villain who throws Michelle Pfeiffer’s Cat Woman through a sky rise window. The kid must have been terrified, but Walken remembers it as “marvelous.”

Playing a tender parental or grandparental figure is somewhat new to the 79-year-old Oscar winner. And after decades of roles—so many movies that sometimes he’ll be scanning the satellite channels and stumble upon one he forgot he made—he appreciates the new scene dynamic.

“It’s different from what I spent most of my life playing. It’s nice now to play fathers and grandfathers and uncles and all of that,” says Walken. “Actors are lucky when, at my age, they’re still able to go and do things. It’s a privilege.”

The Connecticut–based actor flew to Bristol to film the series—a heartwarming comedy (premiering in the U.S. Friday) that delivers on ideal Walken dialogue (when a parole officer complains that he’s lagging, he replies, “We’re working, boss. Harder. Than a prostitute with two mattresses”) and weirdness (he soft-shoes with a push broom in the second episode). 

Walken carries his eccentricities in real life too. There’s his famously unconventional speech pattern—which he has attributed to growing up in Queens, around immigrants who spoke in broken English. There’s his strange connection with cats: His first gig in front of a camera came when baby Walken modeled alongside two cats for a calendar. As a kid, he dressed up like a lion tamer’s son for a bit that involved him working with a gentle giant named Sheba. Walker also wrote the foreword to a book about cats, before playing a cat (reincarnated as a human) in 1988’s Puss in Boots, a pet-shop owner who curses Kevin Spacey to be transformed into a cat in Nine Lives, and a Batman Returns villain who is killed by a fatal kiss from Cat Woman. 

“I just like the company of cats,” Walken says, refusing further introspection. “They’re funny and they’re interesting, and they love to play. And I’ve always enjoyed having them.”

The man also does not carry a cell phone or use a computer—and did not bend during the long pandemic quarantine.

“Having a computer for me is a little bit like having a wristwatch,” explains Walken. “If you need to know the time you ask somebody, because everybody’s got one. And the same with computers. I don’t have a computer, but I of course [have] used computers. My agent uses computers. My wife is good with the computer. If I need something, I just ask.”

Stephen Merchant was so keen to cast Walken that the British director and producer tracked down the actor at his Connecticut home to pitch him on the role. The series was partly inspired by Merchant’s parents’ work in community service; Walken seemed like a natural fit for the most far-out of these parts, given the actor’s inherent otherworldliness. “I like the idea of this man who fell to earth, this kind of almost alien presence in Bristol,” Merchant told press last year. “We’re in this provincial world, and then in comes this charismatic figure like he’s just fallen to earth. But ultimately, he’s just another petty thief like everybody else."

Even with that otherworldly quality, the actor can still deliver unexpected sweetness—as he does in both The Outlaws and Severance, Apple TV+’s hit dystopian drama. In the latter program, Walken shares a tender relationship with John Turturro. Walken says he agreed to do Severance in part because he’s known Ben Stiller, a producer and director on the series, “since he was a young boy. I was friends with his father and mother. I worked with him in a play when, I think, he was a teenager. And I made a rather good movie with him called Envy.” The show was also a chance to reunite with Turturro, the actor and filmmaker who directed Walken in a number of movies, including the recent Big Lebowski spin-off The Jesus Rolls.

Walken has committed himself to an awesome range of films and TV projects over the years, from the revered and award-winning (The Deer Hunter, Pulp Fiction, Catch Me If You Can, King of New York, True Romance) to historically off-the-wall projects like Gigli and Wild Mountain Thyme, the recent film in which Walken boldly attempted an Irish accent. One Twitter follower described Walken’s brogue as “a war crime,” but an accomplished septuagenarian should get points for trying something new. 

When I ask Walken about his trajectory, he balks—talking about his career as if he’s still the Queens day-player he was when he started in show business.

“The truth is, I’ve never made choices. I more or less just do what comes next,” says the actor. “I don’t have kids. I don’t like to play golf or tennis. I don’t like to travel. I mostly just go to work. So the choices that I make have more to do with the opportunities that are in front of me. I like to take a chance. All through my career, sometimes things work out well and sometimes they don’t. But that’s the way it goes.”

Walken doesn’t kick himself when a project’s a bust. “Marlon Brando said in some interview that being an actor was a role of the dice. And I think that’s true. You just take a chance, see what happens,” says Walken. “I wish everything was terrific, but that’s not the way it works.” He maintains loyalty to his films, even the flops. Even Gigli—the film in which he delivered a nonsensical monologue about a Marie Callender’s pie à la mode. “That movie got beat up an awful lot, but I don’t really know why,” says Walken. “It’s got terrific things in it. Sometimes things just don’t click.”

When Walken films something palpably good, though—like True Romance’s extended monologue with Dennis Hopper—he feels it. “The stars were well-aligned or something,” says the actor, recalling set that day in his usual no-frills style. “We shot that in one afternoon, and when we were done, he said to me, ‘We did a good scene today.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I know.’ And he said, ‘Let’s go have dinner.’ So we went back to the hotel, the Chateau Marmont I think.”

Walken’s no-nonsense approach can be traced back to his childhood, when Walken and his two brothers would schlep from Queens into Manhattan for auditions, hustling to book gigs on variety shows and soap operas. In 1954, when Christopher was 11 years old and still going by “Ronald,” his mother, Rosalie, described getting her three sons into the business in a newspaper piece that ran nationally. “Sometimes, I feel like a central casting agency,” Rosalie said, acknowledging that her sons would have to drop out of their regular school for an education more flexible for work schedules.

“It was very different from most childhoods,” says Walken. “It was an unusual education, and I’m very glad I had it. It gave me experience to do what I do as an adult. When you’re a child performer, you’re competitive. You’re out there hustling.” He doesn’t regret the fact that he missed out on a “normal childhood” because “I don’t know what it would’ve been like. I didn’t play baseball, basketball. I still can’t swim, but I can tap dance. It’s different.”

I note the many iterations of Hollywood and entertainment he has seen—the Studio 54 days, the coked-up ’80s, the big-budget ’90s—and ask what has been his favorite to experience.

“The interesting thing about my career is that I was part of something that doesn’t exist anymore,” answers Walken, flashing back to his days as a kid actor on variety shows—“the early days of television after the second World War, when television was getting born, in the late ’40s and early ’50s.” Those were the days. “In a whole neighborhood of people, you had one TV set, and everybody would go to the guy’s house to watch his TV. There were no videotapes, so if you didn’t see Uncle Miltie on a particular night, you missed it. It wasn’t like you could watch it again. At that time in television, everything was kind of one-off. In New York, there were 90 live shows from New York every week. They used a lot of kids, and I was there for that. And that certainly doesn’t exist anymore.”

He isn’t as comfortable with this new day and age, where everything can be viewed online ad nauseam—part of the reason, perhaps, that Walken ascended from beloved actor to pop-culture icon after his viral appearances on Saturday Night Live and Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” music video. The actor didn’t think much about committing to those projects either, and was surprised when he became such a famous pop-culture entity that strangers would try out their Walken impressions on Walken himself.

“People sometimes do imitations of me in front of me,” says Walken, genuinely confused. “I always wonder what they’re doing. I don’t recognize it right away. And then I think, Oh, that’s what they’re doing.’” 

Perhaps the closest Walken has come to replicating his early TV days came in 2014, when the actor signed on to play Captain Hook in NBC’s 2014 live musical of Peter Pan. “I didn’t even think about it when I rehearsed it, and then, about a day before we were going to do the show, it crossed my mind [that] I was going to be doing this live,” says the actor, looking back on the production starring Allison Williams. “I thought, Holy mackerel, what have I gotten myself into?”

But the actor paused and flashed back to what he had learned on a similar New York soundstage decades ago. “When I was a kid, the red light goes on, you go out, and you do whatever it is you’re supposed to do. And then the light goes off, and it’s over.”