After more than 40 years in the business, Christoph Waltz’s list of awards – including two Academy Awards, two Golden Globes and two Baftas – may be almost as long as his filmography. His first performances, for example as Maksymilian Gierymski in 1997’s Our God’s Brother or Karl August in 1999’s The Bride, probably won’t be familiar to audiences outside of Germany. But then he made the crossover to Hollywood, thanks to Quentin Tarantino casting him as Hans “the Jew Hunter” Landa, a Nazi, in 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, and again as the dentist turned bounty hunter Dr King Schultz in 2012’s Django Unchained.
Waltz went on to play one of the best known baddies of all time – James Bond’s arch nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld – first in Spectre in 2015, and again in 2021 in Daniel Craig’s last stand, No Time To Die. Although he cameos in 2014’s Muppets Most Wanted (waltzing with Sweetums the hairy ogre), it is bad guys that Waltz has really made his own. You don’t get much more evil than gangster and meth lab owner Benjamin Chudnofsky in The Green Hornet (2011), Count Volpe, who wants to murder Pinocchio in the 2022 stop-motion musical, or evil CEO Humphrey Wells, who wants to disrupt the world of magic in the 2023 fantasy comedy The Portable Door. Boo! Hiss! Etc.
So, is he as evil and scary in real life? Let’s hope not, as we sit down with the actor who originally wanted to be an opera singer, and who has now partnered with German financial services Allianz in a series of adverts to help people prepare for their financial future (yes, we know it sounds boring but where else will you see Waltz eating spaghetti bolognaise in a white suit on a white sofa for 38 seconds?). So get your Qs by 12pm Monday 17 April and, even if we have to strap him to a chair and inject needles into his head as in that bit in Spectre, we’ll extract his answers and print them here in Film&Music as soon as we can.
