Christoph Waltz Means Business In Killer Workplace Horror-Comedy ‘The Consultant’

In workplace horror-comedy The Consultant, Christoph Waltz seems like dream casting as Regus Patoff, a mysterious figure who turns up at a gaming company and takes over after its CEO is murdered.

There is a steely sinister edge to the titular character in Amazon’sAMZN
Prime Video series that the actor slides into like a hand in a glove, but was he front of mind from the get-go?

“He is a perfect fit, but I’ll be honest with you until someone mentioned his name after I’d written the pilot, I hadn’t considered anyone,” confessed Tony Basgallop, the creator of the show based on the novel of the same name. “I never cast people in my head because you’re going to be disappointed, you won’t get what you want, and that also shapes your writing. You don’t want to write to anyone else’s limitations.”

Waltz’s name first came up when Basgallop met the pilot’s director, Matt Shakman, and discussed possible casting.

“I think we both just had that little glint in our eye that just said, ‘Oh yeah,’ because we knew he would bring an intelligence and a calmness to that character, which, on the page, sometimes I think it could have just gone too big and too explosive,” Basgallop mused. “Christoph would approach it with that sort of intellect, and there’s nothing more terrifying than an intellectual character.”

Waltz added, “If you look for uniqueness, or to look for the hidden diamond in someone’s work, you may get sidetracked from making a living. It’s very much what you’re being invited to do and being asked to fit into something.”

However, he liked what he saw.

“I like to look at scripts, but I didn’t open this one and say, ‘Let me see what could be unique,’ I said, ‘Well, this is a great story,’ and that’s when we met and started the dialogue,” the actor explained. “It’s a leap of faith based on one episode, that’s true, so what becomes much more important is the conversation between the people because you at least want to succeed or fail together. “

One thing Basgallop was keen to get right was Waltz’s character’s entrance in the first episode because “this is the guy that’s going to make the impact.”

“He’s not supposed to be here, and he’s asking for the dead man,” the writer explained. “I think the key was not to overwrite it. He’s this man who was comfortable in his own skin and this environment. It was more of a question like, ‘How does everyone else react to him?’ and, ‘Why can he walk up the stairs?’ These little details instantly kind of set you on edge about someone.”

“Whether he’s an antagonist or the hero, you know as soon as you’ve written that first scene for a character whether or not they’re going to have any life,” he added.

One thing Basgallop and Waltz agreed on early on was that even though The Consultant is set in the US, the series has a distinctly European feel to it in pace and tone.

“I think it was inevitable with Christoph and I involved that there was going to be that flavor to it,” the acclaimed British writer admitted. “I think putting that in an American setting slightly disrupts things. An American would have written this show differently because they would have had different experiences of office life.”

He continued, “I think an American in the lead role would have also delivered it differently. I don’t know what it is that sets us apart as European, but we can’t get rid of these things. I can try and be American on the page, but there’s always something British underneath it.”

“We don’t perceive the story; we make it happen with what we have at our disposal. If that happens to be European, there you go,” Waltz interjected. “A hammer looks different in every single country. The first time I saw a French hammer, I said, ‘Woah, this is a hammer.’ A hammer in England is completely different from a hammer in Austria. Everyone works with the hammer he’s got.”

But who is the enigmatic hammer in The Consultant, Waltz’s Regus Patoff?

“He is something that escapes the question, ‘Who is he?'” the actor teased, picking his words carefully.

“I think the less you say about him, the better,” Basgallop theorized. “I think he has to be that mystery to us. That’s the intrigue of him, and he’s why you lean in. You don’t have enough information about him, and sometimes what you don’t know is more terrifying than what you do know.”

What Waltz didn’t see coming was how Karyn KusamaKSM
, the acclaimed director who had the job of helming The Consultant‘s finale, would blow him away.

“Tony and I had conversations as the story compacted and approached the end because it got very dense,” he recalled. “I was joking with him and saying, ‘Well, let me see you pull out of that one.’ There was a lot of work, but we did it, and when I saw the results, Karen achieved the unexpected. I’ll edit my words not to give too much away, but she gave this story an emotional ending. I was so taken by it. I was touched, and I did not expect that at all.”

The Consultant is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video