Christopher Walken: ‘I got a job as a lion tamer. Who’s going to turn that down?’

He started out working with big cats before becoming Hollywood's go-to guy for menacing oddballs. He talks about The Deer Hunter, the perils of being a world-class dancer - and doing community service with Stephen Merchant

In between his early days as a lion tamer and his latest turn as an old lag doing community service in Bristol, Christopher Walken was Hollywood's go-to guy for disturbed individuals. He was never quite as deranged as Dennis Hopper, perhaps, but those fixed staring eyes and a rictus smile more mirthless than Robert De Niro's have helped convey instability and menace for more than half a century in more than 100 films and TV shows. My whole acting career was a kind of accident," he tells me down the phone from his home in rural Connecticut. I guess you can blame Woody Allen. He must have seen something in me."

In 1977's Annie Hall, Walken played Duane Hall, Annie's oddball brother. Can I confess something?" Duane asks Allen's character Alvy Singer in a darkened room. Sometimes when I'm driving on the road at night I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car ... " Right," replies Alvy, sensibly backing away. Well, I have to go now, Duane, because I'm due back on the planet Earth."