Anthony Hopkins names the hardest role of his career: “Why the hell would they cast me in it?”
There is widespread sentiment these days that British and Irish actors can do just about anything. Why else would seemingly every biopic of well-known American figures go to actors from across the pond? Cillian Murphy won an Oscar for playing native New Yorker J Robert Oppenheimer.
Christian Bale gave us the definitive performance of warmonger and Vice President Dick Cheney. And Naomi Ackie demonstrated her formidable talents playing Whitney Houston. Even comic book adaptations have been swept by the trend.
Anthony Hopkins came of age before this phenomenon properly kicked off, but he’s had a staggeringly lengthy career and has therefore played his fair share (or more than his fair share if you were to ask some of his American competitors) of Yankee roles. That of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter is probably the most famous. It won him an Oscar and terrorised generations of movie watchers, an impressive double whammy. However, cast your eye down his filmography and you’ll see that plenty more of his credits involved some sort of Americanisation.
Given how often he and others of his nation have had to do this, you’d think that pretending to be an American would be, on a technical level at least, pretty painless. But according to Sir Hopkins, that is not always the case. In fact, the hardest job he’s ever done involved playing a famous US figure.
In an interview with Backstage in 2013, the Oscar winner revealed that tackling the titular crook in Oliver Stone’s Nixon nearly did him in. “I’m not American,” he said. “Why the hell would they cast me in it? I gave it my best shot. I think that was the trickiest one to pull off.” It earned him his third Oscar nomination, though that might have just been a formality.
Although Nixon didn’t have quite the revisionist élan of Stone’s previous presidential outing, JFK, it did provide Hopkins with more than three hours of running time to get the characterisation right. Whether he did or not is up for debate. You could either see it as peak 1990s biopic showboating or camp in Oscar’s clothing. For Hopkins, it was a foolish venture that he did without much enthusiasm.
The fact that he considered it his toughest role is still hard to believe, though. Sure, there was a lot of dialogue and much of the character was the result of Stone’s imagination rather than historical record, but Hopkins is no stranger to acting challenges. Remember that time he played Zorro, complete with a fake tan? He also managed to do a passing approximation of Alfred Hitchcock. Nixon should have been a piece of cake.
Having said all that, playing a president is notoriously difficult, not least because of how widely recognised their voice and appearance are. Turning a famous actor into a famous politician either requires hours in a makeup chair to look like a Madame Tussaud’s replica or a performance so mesmerising that preconceptions are drained from the audience’s mind the moment they see the character on-screen.
In Nixon, Hopkins didn’t have either, but he did get an Oscar nod out of it, which has to count for something.
