Viennese Waltz: Inglourious Basterds Brings Late-Career Glory to Austrian Actor

When I tell Waltz that his late-career stardom — along with the attendant Oscar buzz — reminds me of the American actor F. Murray Abraham, who, until winning the Best Actor Oscar at 46 for Amadeus, was best known to audiences for playing the talking leaf in a series of Fruit of the Loom underwear commercials, he counters that he himself starred (as Mozart) in a stage production of Amadeus, in Zurich, at the age of 24. Waltz had recently returned to Europe after studying at the Actors Studio in New York, where he developed little affection for the Method (“I didn’t really like this orthodoxy”) but greatly enjoyed studying script interpretation with the legendary Stella Adler. “I’m fourth-generation theater in my family,” says Waltz, whose parents were theatrical set– and costume designers and whose maternal grandparents were both actors. “I tried to avoid it, but in the end I sort of caved in.”

Playing Hamlet onstage in his late 20s for the acclaimed Swiss director Benno Besson, however, Waltz had a crisis of confidence, wondering if he was really destined to be an actor or had simply taken the path of least resistance. “I remember one occasion in rehearsal, where I said, ‘I don’t think I can do it. I just don’t think I have enough. And at the age of 27, that is really a sort of existential moment.” When similar thoughts began to cloud Waltz’s mind during the making of Inglourious Basterds, he was considerably less panicked.

Kevin Scanlon

Christoph Waltz

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“I’m not so driven by fear to fail anymore,” he says with audible relief. “I’ve failed. I know how it is to fail. It’s not such a tragedy. You know, sometimes one has this fantasy, ‘If I could relive the past 20 years of my life knowing what I know today. ...’ And in a way, working with Quentin had this quality, because after 30-odd years, you know what you have at your disposal, but you don’t know whether you have more or not. So, you have a firm stock to rely on and now you can venture out farther. Brad Pitt asked me, ‘How do you like this?’ And I said, ‘I feel like an old man falling in love with a young girl after having given up on love altogether.’ ”

Thanks to Tarantino, film fans now have a chance to fall in love with Christoph Waltz. Since Cannes, he’s landed an American agent, whom he calls “a smart cookie,” and notes that these days he finds himself with more offers from Hollywood than from Europe. “In Germany, people are scared now — I don’t know of what, but they don’t know how to deal with it,” he says with a Landalike grin. “But America’s different. They smell something that they can do, so this energy is really picking up. Doors are starting to open — they don’t even creak.”

Click here for Ella Taylor’s interview with Quentin Tarantino.