Christoph Waltz

Colonel Hans Landa asks for a glass of milk. He has been offered wine, at a farmhouse kitchen table in occupied France, and he declines it, and he drinks the milk with such pleasure and such good manners that the farmer opposite cannot tell whether he is being flattered or hunted. He is being hunted. Nothing in Inglourious Basterds (2009) is louder than that scene and nothing needs to be. We held our breath for most of it, and what did it was the courtesy: Waltz makes politeness the thing to be afraid of, which almost nobody else on screen can do.

He arrived with that performance fully made. He had spent decades in Austrian and German theatre and television, with detours into British programmes such as The Gravy Train (1990), before Tarantino cast him at 53 as an SS colonel who moves between German, French and English the way other people change chairs. Robert Richardson lit that kitchen through one window and Sally Menke held on him while he finished sentences nobody wanted finished, and the whole film rests on him; the men it is named after nearly sink it. Three years later Tarantino wrote Dr King Schultz for him in Django Unchained (2012), a dentist who shoots people for money with the manners of a man returning a library book. It is the same trick turned inside out, courtesy as a kindness rather than a threat, and Jamie Foxx's Django, watching and saying little, is the right audience for it.

Since then the parts have mostly asked for the menace and not the mind. His Blofeld in Spectre (2015) has the soft voice and the amused patience he is hired for, and then the script hands him a grievance so small that we laughed when it was explained, and the film did not mean us to. Harlander, the arms dealer in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (2025), is there to sign cheques and look sinister, and Waltz does both as if he has read the script once. Del Toro has used him twice; Tarantino wrote for him. That is the difference. Waltz builds a performance out of what is on the page, and when there is little on the page he does not invent it.

He has said, "I don't owe Tarantino my craft, but I do owe him my place," and both halves seem right. The craft is his own: the precision, the pleasure in a well-turned sentence, the relaxed attention that draws the eye without a raised voice. The place has turned out narrower than it should be. Even as a cartoon villain in Minions & Monsters (2026) he purrs as if every line has a contract attached, and that is the joke. Big Eyes (2014) and Alita: Battle Angel (2019) tried him as something other than the man across the table, though we have not reviewed either. Give him a kitchen table and a long enough speech, and we still hold our breath.