Anthony Hopkins once named the movies he regrets making the most
He may have been a familiar presence on-screen for a quarter of a century beforehand, but it’s undeniable the part of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs elevated the career of Anthony Hopkins to the next level.
Of course, he’d long been renowned as one of the most reliable and talented performers of his generation, but it was Jonathan Demme’s psychological thriller that turned him into a household name the world over when the literary adaptation became a critical, commercial, and awards season sensation.
Winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ on his very first nomination, the malevolent and fiercely intelligent psychiatrist with a penchant for human flesh didn’t have much in the way of screentime, but Hopkins devoured every single second to create one of cinema’s most memorable antagonists.
Becoming only the third film in history to win the ‘Big Five’ at the Oscars by scooping ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Actress’, and ‘Best Screenplay’ to go along with Hopkins’ gong, it was inevitable that Hollywood would try and get a sequel off the ground from the second author Thomas Harris revealed a follow-up was in the works.
Sure enough, Ridley Scott took over behind the camera with Julianne Moore replacing Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling in Hannibal, which would earn more money at the box office than its illustrious predecessor despite being vastly inferior in almost every way.
Continuing to mine the cannibalistic vein for all that it was worth, Hopkins would return a third time for prequel Red Dragon, which took place prior to The Silence of the Lambs despite Hopkins quite clearly looking and acting like a man more than a decade older, essentially consigning Michael Mann’s unfairly overlooked Manhunter to the cultural scrapheap by default.
The trilogy may have combined to earn over $800million globally, but Hopkins ended up regretting his decision to return to the well twice more. When asked by The Wrap if he’d have any interest in returning to the role for a fourth time, Hopkins said he’d “made the mistake of doing it twice, three times”.
Underselling The Silence of the Lambs as “okay”, the two-time Oscar winner expressed his regret at playing Lecter three times when one would have been more than enough before voicing his adamance that he was “done with that”.
As a marketable property with inbuilt name recognition, though, Hopkins’ refusal to make a comeback hardly saw the character fade away into the spotlight. Feature-length prequel Hannibal Rising, three-season TV series Hannibal, and one-season episodic wonder Clarice have all emerged since 2002’s Red Dragon, with only Bryan Fuller’s twisted tale starring Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy managing to hold a candle to what Hopkins brought to the table.
