Celebrity StyleChristopher Walken Paints Over An Original Banksy Painting on a BBC Comedy ShowThe artwork was confirmed to be an original prior to the actor’s intervention

By Rachel Davies

November 11, 2021

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The Outlaws, starring Christopher Walken, aired on BBC One in the U.K., and is expected to air on Amazon Prime in the U.S. in 2022.Photo:  STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP via Getty Images

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Laura Dern, Steve Aoki, Lance Armstrong, and Robin Williams are among the famous names who’ve chosen Banksy’s work for their own art collections, but apparently Christopher Walken isn’t so sure about the celebrated English street artist’s work. Or at least one of his characters isn’t. In The Outlaws, a new comedic crime thriller on the BBC, Walken plays Frank, a man who’s putting in community service hours and in cleaning up, comes across a Banksy original and promptly paints over it, the New York Times reports.

Walken’s character Frank, doing his duty, removes a board leaning against the alleyway wall, and behind that board, he finds the Banksy piece hiding. Frank attempts to get his disinterested supervisor to look at the painting of a rat (“It’s awfully good.”) but she urges him to do his job. The rat is quickly hidden beneath a few layers of cream paint. Though it would be easy to write it off the artwork as a recreations, a spokesperson from the show’s production company, Big Talk Productions, reportedly confirmed that the piece was an original Banksy, though none of Banksy’s representatives responded to the Times’s request for comment.

Banksy’s work entitled “Love is in the Bin,”  which was created when the painting “Girl with Balloon” was shredded after it sold at Sotheby’s in 2018.

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This isn’t exactly the first time a Banksy piece has met its demise. Back in 2018, his piece Girl With A Balloon immediately self-destructed after it was sold for $1.4 million at a Sotheby’s auction, falling through the bottom of its frame that, unbeknownst to seemingly anyone but the artist himself, concealed a shredder. In true Banksy fashion, the piece was then renamed Love Is In The Bin and auctioned off for a second time—in the end, the stunt led to the piece fetching $24 million more.

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