Christoph Waltz

The Inglourious Basterds star is the best in the biz at sinister charisma, but his new office-based drama is hard to care about – even if it does seem ...

Hopefully, with a good wind, The Consultant should be the last of them we have to sit through for a while. It’s hard to care what any of them are thinking, doing, motivated by or scared of, when the fundamental blocks of their characters shift from episode to episode, from scene to scene. I’ll just get ahead of those with a very simple “no”, to save you the discourse. He’s the eerie new consultant at an LA-based mobile game developer, CompWare, and as he straightens his tie and creaks up the stairs at the very centre of the office to announce his new regime, the two sexiest employees in the company are forced to ask: just what is going on? [True Detective](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/12/true-detective-box-set-review) or [Lost](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2010/sep/03/lost-your-next-box-set) or that first, good series of [Westworld](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/sep/14/westworld-first-look-review-move-over-game-of-thrones-its-cowboy-time). What if the central core of the puzzle is built on uneven ground, or the tendril-like clues are pulled to the surface by unskilled hands?

Christoph Waltz was the guest on the February 17, 2023 episode of "Real Time With Bill Maher." Waltz and Maher talked moviegoing.

- The bulk of New Rules found Maher wondering when (not if) we’d see a fistfight break out in Congress. “And I think there is a reasoned and constructive attention to not repeating those mistakes in the civil rights arena.” Some of that was due to Waltz’s relatively chaotic presence and some of that was due to the way the two men discussed Waltz’s current project. “I always thought it was redneck food,” he said. (Full disclosure: I’m one of them.) “If you look at the march of civil rights in America, the media has often not been neutral or objective, like we’ve been talking about — it’s been anti-civil rights,” he said. - While Maher is often critical of people in their 20s, his tone on this episode was different and, dare I say, more empathic. “Lincoln and Washington — names that somehow became synonymous with ‘You need a new mattress.’” Maher riffed on Presidents’ Day for a while, with jokes that included references to both George Santos and Amber Heard. “Oh no; I was very successful in my indoctrination program,” Waltz said. “I’m a naturalized citizen,” Waltz said. Later, Waltz explained that it was a “protest beard” due to Lufthansa having lost the part of his luggage that contained his shaving kit. “I would have abused it shamelessly.” At times that focus widened into an exploration of contemporary media writ large, whether it was a discussion of the film industry’s lessons for politicians or an Academy Award winner’s impassioned case for watching movies alongside other people.