Christoph Waltz on playing negative roles: I’m not a moralist, just an actor

Oscar winner Christoph Waltz says he never judges the characters he plays on the screen as he considers himself an actor and not a moralist.

Waltz has made a career out of playing morally-ambiguous to outright sinister characters in cinema and now he is starring as a manipulative and unsettling consultant in the new Prime Video series “The Consultant”.

“I play the part. If the part is good and juicy, you know what, it’s a good and juicy part. It’s a lot of fun. If it’s boring, well it’s boring,” Waltz, 66, said in a virtual interview, also attended by PTI.

The Austrian-German actor became a household name in America with his turn as the villainous Nazi officer Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Bastards” (2009) that earned him his maiden Academy Award.

Three years later, his second collaboration with Tarantino for “Django Unchained” landed him another Oscar, though his role was positive this time.

Over the years, Waltz has been Hollywood’s go-to-guy for characters that explore various shades of grey — from Alan Cowan in Roman Polanski’s “Carnage” and Walter Keane in Tim Burton’s “Big Eyes” to the iconic James Bond nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Waltz believes that people have a “huge misconception” in deciding what’s good and what’s not.

“There’s a huge misconception about bad and good in any case. But in our field even more so. Bad and good, that’s what you come up with. I don’t judge between good and bad. I’m not a moralist. I’m just an actor,” he said.

Asked about striking a balance between comedy and drama, the actor said he doesn’t “act in genres”.

“For me as an actor, I need things to do. And if they contradict each other, then they’re closer to real life and the world. You get more to think about why this happens and then you get closer to why we do it and why you watch it,” he added.

In one of the initial episodes of “The Consultant”, Waltz’s Patoff is shown giving ultimatum to the staff members working from home to reach the company premises or lose their jobs, a moment that mirrored the scenes reported from Twitter headquarters recently.

After his acquisition of the social media giant, technocrat Elon Musk had scrapped Twitter’s work from home policy and ordered its staff to get back to the office.

“That was a coincidence. The Elon Musk thing was good for the marketing of this show, but it was not the first time it ever happened in the history of business. It happens all the time.

“That’s what these consulting companies do. They know diddly-squat about the business they consult. But they make changes that ruin the lives of thousands,” Waltz said.

The actor believes the series, created by Tony Basgallop, makes some key observations about the current generation of workforce.

“It is actually a very astute and close observation of what’s going on inside this generation of the workforce. To me, that’s the whole joke of the story. It definitely mirrors directly what I perceive of the millennial workforce.

“I am always stunned by how conformist they are and how obedient they are. As Einstein said, to be a member of the herd, you have to be a sheep first. That’s what my impression is,” Waltz said.

The millennial workforce is “ultra cool and all the same”, the actor said.

“There’s an ultra cool sort of an eatery because it’s not really a restaurant in Venice that’s very close to the Google headquarters. The people you see there are exactly like these people — ultra cool and all the same. They’re like a herd.

“Ergo, at least I am led to believe there are sheep. And when you talk to them, they talk like sheep. Of course, in the individual case, it may be different when you pluck one of them,” Waltz said.

“The Consultant” also features Nat Wolff, Brittany O’Grady and Aimee Carrero.

Basgallop is the creator and showrunner of the eight-episode series, which currently streams on Prime Video. He serves as executive producer alongside Matt Shakman, Waltz, Steve Stark, and Andrew Mittman.