By Fred Topel | Image property of New Line Cinema.
Hairspray
Every time Christopher Walken can throw a little dancing into his movies, people marvel at what a great dancer he is. Now he finally gets to do a musical on film. In Hairspray, he plays Wilbur Turnblad and shares numbers with John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer.
Christopher Walken on Hairspray
"They make a musical movie now every few years," lamented Walken. "They used to make them every week in Hollywood. Absolutely, the chance to do a movie musical is pretty rare. I was a professional dancer from the time I was a teenager. I was in Broadway shows and tours."
Travolta plays Walken's wife, Edna Turnblad, but the actors got along as two regular professionals. "It was great. It was me and John rehearsing a few weeks for the dancing and of course, sitting around and getting to know each other. Then when it came to do it, he put on that outfit and it was stunning to see that but in five or 10 minutes, he was just John again. I think that he and I in the movie were more Chris and John more than Wilbur and Edna. I liked him a lot and we got along very well and I think that comes off."
New Line Records’ soundtrack to the eagerly anticipated musical comedy Hairspray is now available for pre-order at retailers everywhere and on iTunes. This marks the first time the digital provider has ever made a musical motion picture soundtrack available for pre-order.
Pfeiffer's character comes to try to seduce Wilbur, but he keeps breaking out toys props in his practical joke store. "The props were almost part of the dance. Whether you rehearse a dance differently than a scene, you talk about what it is you’re talking about. When you’re acting, it’s more like what do I want? Were are we? In a dance rehearsal, it has a lot to do with repetition and you just do it and do it until you don’t think about it anymore. That’s the whole point really and the props were just part of the dance."
Walken got to sport wild '60s styles in the film, but he's glad to be rid of them. "I like my current outfit but I had that clothing and outfits, sure. When this movie happened, I would have been about 18, right about out of high school. The cars had the big fins and the people had huge hair. Hair was a big deal. Hair has evolved into something else. People in my neighborhood, everybody had big hair. Hairspray back then wasn’t pump hairspray. It was that aerosol thing that has been banned. But that all really was."
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