Anthony Hopkins names the best movies of his career: “They’re pretty nigh perfect”
Sir Anthony Hopkins holds the dual distinction of being one of the most respected actors of his generation and having a filmography that includes some of the most shameless blockbusters of the past several decades. For every Howard’s End, there is a Transformers: The Last Knight. For every Silence of the Lambs, there is an Alexander. For every Thor: Ragnorak, there is a Thor: The Dark World.
The Welsh actor got an auspicious start when he was scouted by none other than Sir Laurence Olivier when he was an acting student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. From there, he began to establish himself as one of the pre-eminent Shakespearian actors of his day at the Royal National Theatre.
When he moved into the world of film, he got to work with some of the 20th century’s greatest stars, including Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter, Sean Connery and Michael Caine in A Bridge Too Far, and John Hurt in The Elephant Man. But his most famous role came in the 1990s when he played one of the most terrifying characters of all time, the cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. The role won him his first Oscar and made him a mainstream star.
With five further Oscar nominations to his name – he won a second time for The Father in 2021 – Hopkins has every reason to boast about his track record as an actor. However, he is more inclined to credit the script rather than himself. Speaking to The New Yorker in 2021, he insisted that when the screenplay is nearly perfect, you don’t have to call on deep reserves of personal emotional strife to get into character.
“You don’t have to do anything,” he said. “The Remains of the Day, The Silence of the Lambs, The Father. They’re pretty nigh perfect. When you learn that language you pack that into the suitcase of your brain, and those words inform your body. They move you around the set.”
He suggested that the process was similar to music. When you play a piano piece by Chopin, for example, you don’t have to analyse every single note before you play it – the notes are there and when you play them, they are flawless. “We tend to make mincemeat of it by wondering what it all means,” he said.
Such a statement would no doubt outrage a Method actor, but as a performer trained in the world of Shakespeare, Hopkins takes a much more classical approach to the craft. In fact, his comment about how actors make mincemeat out of the meaning of the script sounds a lot like his mentor Laurence Olivier, who, when confronted with Dustin Hoffman’s sweaty, sleepless approach to building a character, said wearily, “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?”
Reading the words as they’re written without considering the meaning behind them has probably come in handy for some of Hopkins’ less prestigious roles. When he’s spouting word salad in a Thor movie or doing some sort of mash-up between Star Wars and Game of Thrones in Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon, it’s probably for the best that he’s not worried about finding meaning. A person could drive themselves to the brink of insanity trying to make sense where no sense is to be had.
