Christopher Walken tries to channel Bugs Bunny in most performances (2025)

What’s…up, DOC? Christopher Walken has starred opposite everybody from Robert De Niro to Sean Connery to Christopher Lee, but there’s one actor he admires above all: Bugs Bunny. And for those who might not consider Bugs Bunny an actor, he has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Walken doesn’t, so how do you explain that?

Walken recently appeared on Ben Stiller’s The Severance Podcast to chat the show and his inspirations. But it was actually off-mic that he told Stiller about his love of the Looney Tunes mascot. “[Walken] said that Bugs Bunny is one of his favorite actors ever. And he was saying this kind of with a twinkle in his eye, but not really. And he said, ‘A lot of times I’ve played roles as if I was Bugs Bunny, but nobody knew.’ Now, which character, which movie, we don’t know.” Let’s be real here: we’re all picturing Bugs Bunny playing Russian roulette in Vietnam…

Walken’s unusual speech patterns and cadence have made him an easy target for impersonations. But we get far less Bugs Bunny than, say, alien. But in full actuality, Walken always figured he spoke in such a way because he grew up with immigrants who had broken English.

With that, there’s now even more mystery to Christopher Walken than ever before (and that’s saying something). But he did give Stiller a little more insight over what makes him tick. “One thing I’ll tell you that he told me, and we didn’t get this on tape in the interview. It was like right after we put the microphones away, we were talking still about acting and how, sometimes, nobody knows what you’re thinking as an actor, but they just see you thinking. And that thought is what reads, and the audience kind of fills it in. It makes it feel real because they’re actually thinking about something.”

What is your favorite Christopher Walken performance? Where do you think he most channeled Bugs Bunny? Let us know in the comments section below.