Waltz, 63, is a genuine epicurean. He’d definitely subscribe to
the phrase ‘valve decision’, the notion that once you experience
better, your newly piqued sensibilities — whether via your palate,
your eardrums or your sleep quality on a plane — can’t go back. “I
appreciate a good drop, and once you taste the good stuff it’s
difficult to drink plonk — as with talking to certain people, or
taking certain jobs,” he says. Does that go for the rolled leaf
he’s clutching in some of the shots here? “Very much so — but it’s
the same thing. I would rather not smoke than smoke some vile herb.
I’d rather not drink than drink some crappy plonk. You don’t want
to fall into the trap of inflationary indulgence because you lose
your appreciation.
“It’s nice to have special occasions here and there, and I think
by choosing quality you can put dots on the i’s and sort of string
yourself along — it makes it completely worthwhile.” And yet Waltz,
a man who seems to spend a good portion of his life fixing his
pupils on a gold needle of truth in the fetid haystack of falsity
that dominates modern life, has no time for what he calls
“professed expertise”. “‘Aficionado’ is a nice word,” he says, “but
‘connoisseur’? Really? Just get on with it and enjoy it and make it
special.”
The risk of slipping a clumsy segue into the conversation
notwithstanding, it’s impossible here to suppress a question: what
would Ernst Stavro Blofeld think of all this? For those late in the
room, Christoph Waltz is the latest of seven actors to play a
character who has a confounding set of guises. Blofeld is a
20-stone former amateur weightlifter with a black crew-cut atop
Benito Mussolini features, a 12-stone silver-haired fox with nasal
syphilis and green-tinted contact lenses, or a six-foot-three
bruiser with a gold-capped tooth and droopy grey moustache,
depending on whether you take Ian Fleming’s descriptions in the
novels Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret
Service, and You Only Live Twice as gospel.
Take the movie adaptations as your source, and Blofeld becomes,
in the earlier films, nothing but a close-up of a hand stroking a
cat; in the later ones, a villainous presence personified by Donald
Pleasence, Max von Sydow and Telly Savalas, among others; and, most
recently of all, the five-foot-six Austrian gentleman portrayed on
these pages — a man whose naturally affable features can, at a
twitch, convey oceans of inner malevolence at the shout of the word
‘action!’ Having survived the helicopter crash at the end of 2015’s
Spectre, Blofeld is back in the Bond franchise’s 25th
outing, No Time To Die, although the leading antagonist’s
podium has been taken by Rami Malek, playing a villain by the name
of Safin.
Read the full interview with Christoph Waltz in Issue 69 of
The Rake - on newsstands 9th April. Subscribe here.
Alternatively, please purchase here
for copies of Issue 69.
