So does Christoph Waltz feel like a star yet?
Lunch with the Bond villain is a delightful affair. He is erudite and charming; the conversation roams freely. He smacks his lips with relish when perusing the menu. He is heartened by the news that there is mango mousse for dessert. The omens are good, we may come out unscathed. But when it comes to the wine list, the man bares his teeth.
The waiter is recommending a sauvignon blanc. It is an extremely good wine, the waiter explains. It has a tropical scent on the nose.
“Absolutely not,” Christoph Waltz says. The very notion makes him snort. “Citrussy. Tropical. Absolutely not.”
The waiter tries again: he suggests the chardonnay. “No,” Waltz snaps. “Definitely not.” This time, he’s not laughing; a frost has descended. If the sauvignon was a joke, then the chardonnay is an insult. His contempt for the wine seems almost personal. All at once, I’m picturing thumb-screws and laser beams. I’m picturing a spring-loaded trap door that opens on to sharks. The waiter has one final shot. “The vernaccia?’ he blurts. “From Tuscany?”
“A-ha,” Waltz purrs. “Now we are getting closer.” He settles back in his seat with a seraphic smile. The tension melts like snow off a car bonnet.
At 59, Waltz is in the prime of his life, an overnight sensation in silvered middle age. He has an Oscar for his devilish performance in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and another for playing the good guy in the same director’s Django Unchained. Before that, there were decades in the doldrums and a supply of cheap-plonk acting roles, much of which he sent back, and some of which he choked down, because what else could he do? “There was no alternative,” Waltz says ruefully. “Or, rather, the alternative was a very deep river. And a heavy stone around my neck.” I think he’s joking, but maybe not.
Waltz is having the monkfish, steamed spinach on the side. He arranges his napkin with an old-world formality, every inch the cultured, mittel-European emigre: perfectly laundered in a cream linen suit, accent as sharp as the bread knife. He might have sprung fully formed from a novel by Nabokov or Thomas Mann. He takes a sip of the wine and finds it to his liking. He has sampled success and is quite fond of that, too. “It would be completely laughable if I claimed I was always motivated by the pure craft of acting and that recognition doesn’t play a part,” he says. “Of course it does — that’s human nature. The bohemian artist who exists only for his art, it’s a myth. OK, it might have been true for Giacometti, but it certainly wasn’t for Picasso or Mozart. There is no such thing as pure art. It’s a bourgeois conceit.”
Ahead of our lunch, I’m shown preview footage from Spectre, the 24th official James Bond film. It is still being edited, and the security surrounding it has reached Fort Knox levels, but evidence suggests the picture takes its lead from 2012’s Skyfall, in the sense of mining Bond’s back story and rattling his childhood chains. The footage looks good: it whisks us from a howling car chase through nocturnal Rome to the Day of the Dead festivities in Mexico City, and finally across the Alps to the monster’s lair. Waltz plays Franz Oberhauser, Bond’s long-lost foster brother who (rumour has it) may also be Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the elusive Moriarty figure portrayed in previous outings by Donald Pleasence, Charles Gray and Telly Savalas. Oberhauser is everywhere and nowhere; he’s the imp in the machine. He has the regimental haircut, the mandarin collar and the gleaming bonhomie of a sadistic dentist. All that’s missing is a white cat.
Waltz pulls a commiserating face: he can’t reveal much about Spectre. He’s been sworn to secrecy and besides, nobody has seen the final edit yet. “I was asked this morning, ‘Can we outdo Skyfall?’ What does that even mean? Outdo by what measure? Bigger? Louder? Redder?” The whole thing is ridiculous, he says.
At one point in the new film, Oberhauser taunts Bond: “You came across me so many times, and yet you never saw me.”
The same can be said of Waltz, a jobbing actor since his early 20s, on the German stage and in movies, and on British television. He was in the 2001 political thriller Dance With The Devil, directed by his friend Peter Keglevic. He appeared in Ordinary Decent Criminal alongside Kevin Spacey, Catherine The Great with Catherine Zeta-Jones. But our gaze slid clean off him and he left little impression.
Spectre director Sam Mendes tells me he became aware of Waltz only with the release of Inglourious Basterds, in 2009. Mendes says he has no idea why it took him so long. “He is a very unusual actor, though, so it can’t be a total surprise that he has had an unusual career. It’s very rare to find someone whose first language isn’t English, yet who has such a complete command of the nuances and subtleties of the English language. He’s a one-off.”
Waltz was born and raised in Vienna, the son of an artistic, middle-class household. His parents were costume designers; his maternal grandfather a noted psychologist and student of Freud. He spent 15 years of his career in London, renting a house with his American-born first wife, Jackie, a psychotherapist, and their three school-age children. In the late 1980s, Waltz played Dr Hans-Joachim Dorfman in The Gravy Train, a Channel 4 mini-series, and went on to appear (looking ill at ease and a trifle callow) as a buffoonish German spy in The All New Alexei Sayle Show. He says he was good friends with Sayle, but hasn’t seen the comic in years. He read some of Sayles’s short stories recently and enjoyed them very much. He smiles. “I must say I liked them better than his comedy.”
Should you require a crash course in pre-stardom Waltz, check out YouTube. There he is, cavorting in a stripy leotard on kids’ TV, pleasuring a damsel with his toes inside a brimming bathtub in a historical mini-series, being upstaged by a crime-fighting dog in a show called Kommissar Rex. His career, he concedes, has contained “more downs than ups”; he once spent nine months unemployed after quitting a theatre because he hated his colleagues (“I left on very bad terms”). His face didn’t fit and his accent stood out. He was prickly and exacting, and did not suffer fools gladly.
Was this uncompromising stance more a curse than a blessing? “Well, yes,” he allows, “but it was a combination of things. If I could have put my finger on the problem, I could have solved it. Of course, it’s partly a psychological predisposition — one can get in one’s own way very easily — but it was also about the specific requirements of the industry. And it was also about luck. In the end, I suppose, it was mostly bad luck.”
Was he ever tempted to jack in the acting and find a new line of work? “Funnily enough, my wife did raise that point. She raised it repeatedly. Very encouragingly, she said, ‘Oh, you could do anything. You’re so talented. Why do this?’” Waltz laughs mirthlessly. “I took offence. To say the least.”
The marriage broke down and he moved to Berlin. He married again, to costume designer Judith Holste; the couple have a 10-year-old daughter. Yet Waltz was still struggling, up to a point. “I mean, I never had to work at a car-rental company,” he says. “I made a living, so I guess I was privileged.”
He must have had a sense that he would fulfil his true potential if he could hold out long enough? “I suppose I did, and that’s what helps you survive. But you never know whether that’s just a sense, or whether it is something concrete. ‘Oh yes, I’m born for something greater. I’m doing summer stock in Tunbridge Wells, but I sense — I sense! — that I am meant for better things.’ That way lies rampant self-delusion. That’s where all the nasty actor jokes are coming from.”
In 2008, the door did not so much open as blow clean off its hinges. He was called to audition for a peach of a part, the role of the “Jew hunter” in Inglourious Basterds, a boisterous second world war epic directed by Quentin Tarantino. The way Waltz tells it, he only went along for the ride, assuming that the whole process was an elaborate charade. To secure European finance, American producers have to show willing by road-testing a few local actors. Then they throw up their hands, lament their misfortune and cast the bankable Hollywood star they were always going to cast anyway.
Except this time it was different. Tarantino decided that this obscure fiftysomething was the perfect (he says the only) choice to play silken, cerebral SS colonel Hans Landa, who dances between German, French and English; between twinkling mischief and outright malevolence. For Tarantino, he was the only actor who could take the ornate, lavish dialogue and make it sing. For Waltz, it was the role he had been longing for. “I don’t owe Tarantino my craft,” he says, “but I do owe him my place.”
Inglourious Basterds would go on to earn Waltz a whopping 27 awards, culminating in the best supporting actor Oscar. It transformed his life. I ask whether the A-listers with whom he now shares top billing are conspicuously better than the grafters he worked with on the likes of Kommissar Rex. He reckons there is not a great deal of difference; instinctive actors can be found both upstairs and down.
“I think success has made me more understanding,” he says. “I mean, I’m just as intolerant as I was before, but I am infinitely more understanding. Because there are so many good actors who would love to work on good projects and apply their considerable talents to a great text. And yet they have to make a living. They have to exist in some form of dignity, if possible — and maybe it isn’t even possible. And my God, I’ve been there. I’ve done so many jobs because I’ve had to, not because I’ve wanted to. And it’s honourable to do a job because you need to feed your children, and maybe there is also something in it for your development as an actor. But only up to a point. Frustration can get the better of anyone. And I dread to imagine what would have happened to me had it not been for Quentin.”
But in a sense, I say, it had already happened. He had found his level as a journeyman, a spear-carrier, just like thousands before him. “Indeed,” he laughs, “but it can always get worse. The one guarantee about life is that it can always get worse.”
Waltz says that when he began working in London, he was held back by his accent. He longed to play Shakespeare but kept hitting a wall. He recalls once pleading with the theatre director Peter Wood to let him take the role of Caliban in The Tempest, and how scandalised Wood was at the prospect. “He said, ‘That’s Shakespeare, so Caliban is English.’ And I said, ‘But is there something wrong with an earth spirit speaking with a different accent? He’s still speaking Shakespeare, he just pronounces the words differently.’ But [Wood] said, ‘Excuse me! That’s Shakespeare!’ and so what can you do? A prejudice of that kind. It’s utterly insurmountable.”
In the wake of Inglourious Basterds, Waltz was suddenly in demand. Like Conrad Veidt, Anton Walbrook and Paul Henreid before him, he became the European guest at the Hollywood party: precise and attractive, not entirely to be trusted. He played the sadistic ringmaster in Water For Elephants, a caustic New York attorney in Roman Polanski’s Carnage and a fraudulent artist in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes. I love him best in Django Unchained, Tarantino’s exuberant revenge western from 2012, in which Waltz plays Dr King Schultz, a bounty hunter who helps a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) find his wife. Schultz is measured, playful and softly spoken. He provides the calm moral compass in a film that otherwise flies out in all directions.
It strikes me that throughout all these recent credits, Waltz plays men who are identifiably German, yet in each case there is no great need to explain or justify this. The actor grins; he has noticed this, too. “I said to Tim Burton, ‘Do you want me to do something with the accent?’ and he just said, ‘Why? What’s wrong with the accent?’” He says that good directors see possibilities where others see only pitfalls.
If Waltz’s late-blooming stardom has changed his perspective, it follows that it must have affected those around him as well. Fame is a whirlwind; it rearranges the furniture. The actor nods. “I almost broke with an old schoolfriend, whom I liked a lot, because he cannot get over the conversational point — let’s put it that way — of my recent fame. He needs to talk about success compulsively with me. And when I didn’t answer his emails, he wrote, ‘Oh, now you’re too good to talk to your friends.’ And I wrote back and said, ‘No, I’m too good to have this conversation. I’m too good to talk to my old friends about success.’ Because I’m still the same person. I’m still the same actor. I mean, if my oldest friends don’t grant me that, then I’m really [expletive].”
Waltz has been thinking about this a good deal of late. Right now, he, Judith and their daughter are in the process of relocating from Berlin to Los Angeles. Life is good, he has achieved what he dreamed of and the only possible downside is the loss of anonymity. Which is silly, he admits, because he so craved recognition — who doesn’t? “It’s a problem with no solution,” he says. “You can be an anonymous observer all your life, but then you never get the platform to transform those observations into art, or whatever it is you want to transform it into. And that’s a lamentable paradox, because it’s the reason the entertainment industry is so hermetic. It closes itself off from the world it wants to talk about.”
In the past, Waltz risked shooting himself in the foot. He could be too impatient, too demanding; he feels that the industry is based on mediocrity, and on the assumption that the audience is stupid and therefore can’t cope with anything complex. But what is an audience? Who is the average filmgoer?
He says Carl Jung once claimed that if you collected a sample of 1,000 pebbles, you could calculate the average weight of a pebble on the beach. And yet the chances of finding a single pebble that matches that weight is about a million to one: it basically can’t be done. Waltz loves this analogy; he thinks it proves that everyone is a square peg in a round hole, as awkward and as thorny as he is. “You cannot reach a generality,” he says. “And you cannot reach an individual through generalities.”
Once his Bond duties are done, Waltz is planning to direct his first feature film, The Worst Marriage In Georgetown, the true story of Albrecht Muth, convicted of murdering his wealthy older wife, though he scoffs at the billing (“What is truth anyway?”). In the meantime, he has a new home to furnish and money to spend.
His days on the dole are a long way behind him, yet he carries the experience with him; he catches himself constantly counting his pennies. Judith will say, “You can throw out that toaster, it doesn’t work any more. Just buy a new toaster. You have two Oscars, for God’s sake.” And he will stare at her and say, “What’s that got to do with anything?” because on some level he still believes he is that journeyman actor, one step away from the car-rental desk. He points out that WC Fields stashed small sums of money in Main Street banks up and down the United States, just in case he ever found himself homeless and drifting and in need of a meal. He suspects that he might be a little like that as well. “Try as you might, you can never break free from your past.”
Waltz recalls that earlier today he was asked how much fun it was to play a Bond baddie: could he rate the experience on a scale of one to 10? He was utterly stumped. Now, for my benefit, he cocks both thumbs and affects a ghastly rictus grin. “Eleven!” he says. “Eleven out of 10!”
He wants to play the game, but it doesn’t suit him. His eyes are ablaze and his German accent is showing. The bland movie star is the one role he can’t master, and let’s hope he never does.
Spectre releases in UAE cinemas on November 5.
