Anthony Hopkins names his favourite westerns of all time: “A great movie about rival factions”
His rise to big screen stardom coincided with a time when the genre was finally beginning to recede in mainstream popularity, having spent decades as one of cinema’s most marketable genres, which might explain why Anthony Hopkins and the western have largely been kept apart.
There’s no rule that says an actor from Port Talbot can’t ride the great plains of the American West on horseback, dust off a six-shooter, and sport a wide-brimmed hat. Yet, despite his impressive career, the two-time Academy Award winner has largely remained a stranger to the world of westerns.
Edward Zwick’s elegiac Legends of the Fall is the closest he’s come, but even at that, the story stretches from the early 20th century through to World War I and the Prohibition era before ending in 1963, so it was hardly cut from the classical mould of John Wayne and John Ford.
The Legend of Zorro might count seeing as it carries many of the western’s favoured tropes, albeit with swashbuckling swapped in for gunplay, while Hopkins earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for overseeing a futuristic theme park predicated entirely on that period of time in Westworld.
Michael Caine never made a western because he hated horses, but Hopkins has never shown such inclinations. He’s a fan of the medium, too, even if his legendary career never gave him the opportunity to emulate the heroes and villains he’d been so entranced by as a youngster.
It may have been a well-paying gig that he eventually distanced himself from and belittled for requiring no acting whatsoever, but Kenneth Branagh’s Thor nonetheless helped Hopkins turn a corner in his career. It was a Shakespearean twist on superheroic fantasy, but in an interview with Pop Entertainment, the veteran revealed that he and his director saw shades of the western in there, too.
“We talked, not extensively, but a good bit about the good old westerns,” he said of his discussions with Branagh. “Shane was one of my all-time favourite westerns, when the bad guys come in, and they have a conference, and they try to negotiate. Jack Palance looks sinister and all that, to have that sort of feeling of big with the autocratic father and the troublesome sons.”
Nobody’s going to argue with director George Stevens and star Gary Cooper’s Shane being one of cinema’s greatest-ever westerns, because that’s exactly what it is. That being said, Hopkins’ second favourite arrived two decades later and wasn’t received anywhere near as well.
“There’s a wonderful film called Lawman which Ken and I talked about, with Burt Lancaster; a great movie about rival factions,” he continued. “There’s the father, played by Lee J Cobb, and all these bad sons he’s got. And there’s always one son who’s a little in the middle, not quite sure where he belongs.”
Actors channel their personal favourites all the time to inspire their performances, but even at that, taking Shane and Lawman, combining it with Shakespeare, and then throwing Marvel Comics into the mix makes for one of the more eclectic melting pots Hopkins has ever concocted.
