The “electrifying” actor Anthony Hopkins called the best he ever worked with: “The most exciting and dangerous”
Having been an actor for over 60 years and evolved from a prodigiously talented upstart into one of the industry’s most beloved veterans, it’s only natural that someone of Anthony Hopkins‘ calibre has rubbed shoulders with some of the greatest and most famous names to grace the silver screen.
He grew accustomed to it at the beginning of his career when he became Laurence Olivier’s understudy and protege, and there aren’t many learning trees better to sit under than one of the all-time best. Even when he graduated to cinema in the late 1960s, there were legends everywhere he looked.
Among Hopkins’ many, many, many, many iconic co-stars are Katharine Hepburn, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jodie Foster, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Al Pacino, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Gene Hackman, all of whom are either superstars, decorated dramatic powerhouses, or both.
That’s barely even scratching the surface of his lengthy list of scene partners, but there’s only room at the top for one. In a way, it seems fitting that Peter O’Toole would be the actor Hopkins named as the best he’d ever worked with because they were similar in more ways than one.
The most obvious was their penchant for a bevvy and a night on the town, although Hopkins gave that up several years after they worked together on A Lion in Winter. They also despised the trappings of celebrity that came with being a famous actor, and those similarities almost saw them come to blows.
“He was electrifying,” the two-time Academy Award winner told Playboy. “The most exciting and dangerous actor I’d ever worked with. We had some wild times together.” As professional as they were when the cameras were rolling, Hopkins and O’Toole regularly found themselves in booze-soaked opposition.
“O’Toole and I, both smashed, were ready to beat each other up,” he recalled. “He was mad. He drank as much as I did and probably more, and he had that kind of yearning zest for life. He hated the Welsh. He said, ‘You’re like that other Welsh bastard, Richard Burton. You’re a fucking misfit. Play the piano and all that stuff, and you’re a stargazer.'”
Hopkins’ passing interest in astrology was apparently enough to piss O’Toole off, which saw the former reciprocate by also calling the latter a “bastard” and revealing that he once invited him to step outside of a restaurant they were dining in to have a brawl in the streets, which didn’t come to pass. “I meant it,” the erstwhile Hannibal Lecter added for posterity. “I was going to deck him. I didn’t care.”
They were two peas in a hard-drinking, antagonistic, and Hollywood-hating pod, which might explain why O’Toole left such a lasting impression on Hopkins, an experience he’s never been able to replicate with another actor.
