NEW YORK -- 'There's a story about Picasso," begins Christopher Walken. "Who knows if it's true or not, but sometimes the story is more interesting than the truth. There comes a point sometimes when it doesn't matter if it's true."

Walken is talking about his character in Steven Spielberg's buoyant Catch Me If You Can, which opened Wednesday. We'll get to his point about Picasso in a moment, but first let's focus on his notion about the story being more important than the truth, because it offers an essential strand in understanding why we believe what we do about Walken. For the 25 years since his back-to-back unsettling turns in two films, first as the title character's suicidally high-strung younger brother in Annie Hall and then as the Russian roulette-playing Vietnam vet in The Deer Hunter, Walken has been known as the man who's happy to don a kind of psychotic blackface and dance the weirdo for our pleasure.

"I think early on I got some sort of a self-destructive ball rolling," he speculates in his barely modulated purr with that herky-jerky rhythm. "I think from the beginning there's been something off-centre: the way I looked, the paleness, a kind of exoticness." That on-screen image adhered to Walken. His psycho killer personae pushed aside his genuinely cuddly reputation among his peers as a suave professional dancer and a shy fellow who likes animals. In Walken's case, the story became the truth. "Certainly, the jobs that I get justify that," he allows.

Of course, recognizing the value of people believing that he's a kissing cousin to his freakazoid characters, Walken sometimes plays up the story. ("It's more interesting than the truth.") So today, his hair, brown with touches of grey at the margins, is styled to thrust heavenward, a uniform seven-centimetre flaming aura that makes him look like a punkish undertaker. Then there's that nearly translucent skin, those faded blue eyes, ghostly light eyebrows, and thin lips that seem a little too red to be naturally hued. (Lipsticked? Tattooed? Or is it just that all of the blood in his face flows to his lips?)

From Sean Penn's murderous father in At Close Range to the two gangsters he spun in a pair of Abel Ferrara films, King of New York and The Funeral, Walken's consistently creepy dudes are fully rounded characters, but they're not self-aware enough to be indelible screen creations. They're somewhere between the narrowly played cartoon villains of, say, Gary Busey in a straight-to-video flick and the magnificent miscreants that win Oscars for Michael Douglas and Anthony Hopkins.

In other words, Walken is the go-to guy if you're making a high-quality film but you don't want your villain to steal the picture. "They say that everybody gets dealt a hand, and it has to do with how you play it," he says, explaining his success. "I got dealt a good hand. I think I played it very well. It's not like I was Mozart and then I frittered away my talent. I think what I started with was modest and I think I played it well."

It's always a treat to see him play that hand, to observe the infinite variations he can spin on a villain. But every so often we get a glimpse of something else that makes us wish that evil dude story about Walken wasn't so persuasive. Catch Me gives him the opportunity to flex some acting muscles, to show us a side we've never seen, in a heartfelt supporting role as the father to Leonardo DiCaprio's teenage con artist.

Walken plays Frank Abagnale Sr., a stationery store owner and an upstanding member of the suburban Rotary Club who runs into a string of bad luck. Hounded by the Internal Revenue Service for some minor infractions, he loses his wife and his business, and watches as his son make an impressive career out of kiting cheques. Not that Dad is upset: fact is, he taught little Frank some tricks of the trade that ended up setting him on his criminal path.

"I think if he had his choice, Frank Sr. would be a world-class con man, but his son is better at it. He teaches his son certain things and then his son takes it to a level of kind of genius," Walken says.

Which brings us back to Picasso. Walken says: "Picasso's father was a painter, and there's a story -- who knows if it's true -- that at one point, when Picasso was a teenager, his father looked at some paintings he'd done and said, 'That's it, I'll never paint again. If this kid can paint so much better than me, I give up.' "

So, sure, there's a felonious edge to Frank Sr., but in Walken's hands, he's such a mild-mannered, Willy Lomanesque sad sack puppy dog that you can't help giving him the benefit of the doubt. And he tugs at your heart, too: When you watch Catch Me, notice how Frank Sr. continues to wear his wedding ring even after his cheating wife Paula has divorced him. Is he putting on a show for the rest of the world, like a good salesman should, or is he just fooling himself?

Walken says it's nice for a change to be playing someone who's closer to home. "The truth is, I should play those Fred MacMurray parts. That's more like what I am," he says. "I'm a very conservative person. I mean, I am. I pay all my bills and things like that. I drive real slow. Do you know that I've had a driver's licence since I was 16, and I've never had a moving violation? Never. I think I have maybe two parking tickets."

And how did those make him feel? "Horrible!" he laughs. "But I think, if anything, I'd get arrested for driving too slowly. People do yell at me. I had a guy drive by me recently and scream out his window -- 'LOSER!' -- because I'd let some cars go in front of me. 'LO-SER! You in the Volvo! LOSER!' " He grimaces with the memory and mutters, "If there was ever a time that I wanted to be a villain, it was then."

Walken's private life is quiet. He and his wife, a casting director for The Sopranos, have been together for more than 30 years. While they live in Connecticut, they have a small apartment in Manhattan, but he's not one for the crush of the city. He rarely ventures in unless it's for work. In fact, one of the things he loves about being an actor is the irregular hours. He can go to movies at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, or a hot restaurant before night falls, and completely miss the crowds. And sure, he showed some funky moves last year, dancing in the Fatboy Slim video for the song Weapon of Choice, but he's not one for the New York nightlife.

"Naw, I'm too old," he scoffs, chuckling at the thought while noting that he'll be turning 60 next March. "But in my day, in the seventies, sure, I was a Studio 54 denizen and all that stuff. But there comes a time when you're out there on the disco floor and you feel foolish."

There's one other reason he doesn't like to hit the town. "I enjoy being recognized," he admits. "If I walk around in New York and nobody recognizes me, I get depressed. And then somebody will yell 'Hey Chris!' from a truck or something, and then I'll feel much better. It goes up and down like that. So sometimes I stay home just because I'm afraid nobody will recognize me."

Even if it's not true, it's a good story.