If playing a James Bond villain was once a rather cheesy affair, that's all changed since Daniel Craig took over the role of Ian Fleming's super spy. Last time out, he tackled the Oscar-winning Javier Bardem, who was marvellously menacing as cyber-terrorist Raoul Silva. This time, in the hugely anticipated 24th 007 film, Spectre, he goes one better – facing off against the two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz.
Waltz, who won his Academy Awards for his delicious portrayals of a Nazi and later of a bounty hunter in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, seems almost tailor-made to play a Bond villain. Erudite and elusive, he's far too experienced to let slip anything about his character – the mysterious Franz Oberhauser. "Nothing that would be revealing of anything further than what you have seen," he says.
The very way this Austrian-born actor speaks feels crafted in the Bond workshop. One line he utters to Bond in the film – “I thought you came here to die” – has a true Goldfinger ring to it. But Waltz, 59, is all too aware of getting caught sounding like a clichéd Bond baddy. “I don’t quote,” he says. “I don’t even quote in my head. I need to say it within the context, and it’s really the context that is important, not the line.”
Spectre may be the biggest-budget Bond yet at upwards of US$200 million (Dh734.5m), but Waltz is not one for Hollywood hype. “I’m disappointingly unimpressed by scale,” he says. “You could really impress me with detail.” He puts it down to the 30 years of what he calls “enforced labour” – toiling away in German theatre, film and television productions before he got famous. “It keeps your feet on the ground.”
Since Tarantino cast him, esteemed directors as Tim Burton (Big Eyes), Terry Gilliam (The Zero Theorem) and Roman Polanski (Carnage) have flocked. So does it feel strange, given how late in his career success has come?
“If I say it doesn’t feel strange, it doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate it the way I do, which is limitless almost,” he notes. “But it’s not strange. It’s actually the level that I aspire to.”
Scoring a Bond villain will surely etch Waltz even further into movie folklore, though he is not the first Austrian to do so. "I'm at least the third," he says, pointing out there was Curd Jürgens, the German-Austrian who played Karl Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me, and Klaus Maria Brandauer, who appeared as Maximillian Largo in Never Say Never Again.
"I'm aware of a tradition," he says. "I do what I can, more or less. But I'm just the actor." While Sam Mendes returns to the director's chair after helming Skyfall – the most successful Bond film of all time – Waltz's entry into the series was initiated long before Mendes was involved. "We've always wanted to have him," says producer Barbara Broccoli. "We've met him several times, and we've always wanted to find the right role for him."
And what better role than the leader of Spectre? As the title suggests, 007 is reunited with the terrorist organisation that taunted him when Sean Connery played the character back in the 60s. Now, Oberhauser is the leader of this nefarious network, though Waltz refuses to say whether he’s actually playing Spectre’s original number one, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. “What am I supposed to say?” he shrugs. “I can’t say ‘yes’, I can’t say ‘no’.”
He’s a little more forthcoming on the nature of this Spectre 2.0. “The specific quality of threat has changed, within Spectre,” he says. “We’re not so – except for Putin now – remembering that the Cold War was a cool thing! We haven’t been so worried about nuclear threats lately. We’ve been worried about what’s going on in the cyber-sphere. We all have reason to be worried about the transparency that is being imposed upon us against our will.”
While he wasn’t particularly a Bond fan as a child, growing up in a Vienna household where both his parents were costume designers, Waltz admits he’s always been impressed by the way the series “expresses the present”, as he puts it. “The darker, more desperate fibres in the story would have been completely out of place in the 60s,” he says. “Back then, the sexual revolution was the interesting topic of the moment. That is not so much the topic anymore.”
Since completing Spectre, Waltz has two more movies under his belt – the 17th century-set artist tale Tulip Fever and a big-budget version of Tarzan – and there's talk he'll make his directorial debut with The Worst Marriage In Georgetown, the true story of the murderous Albrecht Muth. The pressure is off, at last.
“Not that I feel secure,” he says with a nod. “But luckily, the existential threat has been removed.”
• Spectre opens in UAE cinemas at midnight
artslife@thenational.ae
