Oscar winner Christoph Waltz on new series 'The Consultant' streaming now in UAE

Christoph Waltz knows a few things about acting, and he has the Academy Awards to prove it. Yet in a recent conversation, he made light of the skills required.

“I don’t believe in good actor, bad actor,” he said. “If you’re playing an interesting part in a worthwhile story and you’re cast properly, you’d have to be a complete idiot to not be good.”

It is difficult to tell how serious Waltz is when he makes this type of deliciously arch grand statement, just as it is difficult to pinpoint what drives his latest screen creation — the title character of the satirical new Amazon workplace thriller The Consultant.

Adapted by Servant creator Tony Basgallop from the 2015 novel by Bentley Little, the eight-episode series streaming now on Prime Video, tells the story of a video game studio after the sudden, violent death of its young founder, which sends the company into a tailspin. Out of nowhere, an off-putting stranger named Regus Patoff (Waltz), who claims to be a hired consultant from Crimea, appears and takes over. It is obvious immediately that something is a little off — or maybe a lot.

Like many of Waltz’s best-known characters, Regus is unfailingly soft-spoken and courteous — even when firing a guy for how he smells — as was Waltz himself on a recent morning in the Drawing Room of the Greenwich Hotel in Manhattan. And yet there is usually a wry edge to what he does, which often plays as ruthless in his characters, not least the two for which he won Oscars: an SS officer in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and a bounty hunter in Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

A man of wide-ranging interests

His character stays true to form in The Consultant, which he described as “the first series that I’ve done.” That isn’t entirely accurate — he has had many guest spots and had regular roles in a few European series decades ago — but it is the first time Waltz, 66, has carried a modern Hollywood series, and with a role so thoroughly Waltz-like. (A series of Quibi short-shorts in which he starred, Most Dangerous Game, has since been condensed into a film.) Regus is as seductive as he is ominous, a frightening mix of outwardly pleasant and subtly menacing, a balance that Waltz has perfected over the years.

“On the page the character is very harsh and forthright, but onscreen there’s only so far you can go in being nasty,” Basgallop, who is also the showrunner, said in a video conversation. “You also have to have a lot of charm, which I think Christoph brought to it.”

In person, that edge Waltz brings to his roles is the furthest thing from menacing, but it does make for good sport. He is intellectual, playful, a little mischievous — as likely to challenge a question as to answer it. A man of wide-ranging interests, he quoted or paraphrased Stanley Kubrick, Charles Eames, Albert Einstein, Timothy Snyder, Aristotle and Stephen Sondheim in the course of an 80-minute conversation.

In a typical rally, he hit a deceptively gentle lob back over the net after being asked if he had ever felt he nailed a scene or role.

“All this market-economy vocabulary: ‘nailed it,’” he said. “Well, if you nail it, where do you nail it to? What kind of nail do you use? Why nail it in the first place? It can’t go anywhere anymore. Wouldn’t it be the goal to keep it flowing?”

He leaned back in his seat, smiling like the Cheshire Cat.

Born and raised in Vienna, Waltz spent decades bouncing around Europe in the workaday worlds of theatre and television and doing the occasional film before landing his breakout role in Inglourious Basterds, which debuted when he was 52. At the time, he told The New York Times that after acting in a lot of comedies, playing the villain had become “sort of the flavour of the past few years.”

Most of it wasn’t particularly rewarding, but his relationship with Tarantino freed him to combine his facility for both comedy and villainy in more interesting ways — and to be choosier. It also brought him to Los Angeles, where he has been living full time since the mid-2010s.

He does a lot with a little

Waltz has credited his analytical approach to acting in part to the technique of script interpretation taught by Stella Adler, to which he was exposed during a stint in New York beginning in the late 1970s. In his analysis, the power of his character in The Consultant rests in little more than people’s eagerness to follow someone who assumes an air of authority.