“He’s a bastard to work with”: the co-star set on a collision course with Anthony Hopkins
Before he was immortalised forever as Anthony Hopkins, the major movie star, Wales’ finest acting export plied his trade in the theatre for many years. However, Hopkins’ relationship with the theatre has always been tenuous because, in those early days, the star admitted to being something of an enfant terrible. He was unhappy with his station in life, was drinking heavily, and spent most of his time dreaming of jetting off to America to work in Hollywood.
Indeed, Hopkins went to America as soon as he could, moving to the US when he first came out to perform Equus in New York in 1974. By ’79, he had settled in Beverly Hills, which is about as far away from his native Wales, and the Shakespeare plays he made his name on back in England, as he could get.
“I always wanted to live here,” Hopkins told The New York Times in ’79. “I wanted to be a movie star, to be famous, rich. When I go back to England, they say, ‘Haven’t you sold out?’ The English think you shouldn’t enjoy yourself.”
Unfortunately for Hopkins, his Hollywood career didn’t take off quite as quickly as he might have wanted, and even though he won rave reviews for his performance in The Elephant Man in ’80, it didn’t lead to immediate superstardom. Perhaps this disappointment contributed to Hopkins’ state of mind when he found himself back in England, bristling with frustration while shooting a production of the classic Ibsen play Little Eyolf for the BBC’s TV anthology series Play of the Month.
Hopkins was cast alongside The Avengers star Diana Rigg in the production, a fellow theatre veteran he’d also worked with in a ’72 National Theatre production of Macbeth. That play hadn’t been a great experience for Hopkins, who admitted, “I was fed up with the way things were going. I was very discontented and restless. I wasn’t a good company member. I wanted to do things my way.”
However, despite him being miserable, Hopkins and Rigg didn’t seem to have personal problems with each other back in ’72. Fast-forward ten years, though, and nobody who worked on Little Eyolf could fail to see that relations between the two stars had become strained, to say the least. TV legend James Cellan Jones even warned director Michael Darlow not to cast Hopkins opposite Rigg, exclaiming, “That’s insanity! He’s a bastard to work with, and Di and he just don’t get along.”
Indeed, the two veteran actors seemed like they were on a collision course from day one, with Darlow gritting his teeth in anticipation of the seemingly inevitable day it would all boil over. According to Darlow, Hopkins and Rigg didn’t say a word to each other outside of their dialogue in the play. “It was quite bizarre,” he marvelled. “For two weeks they played the most intimate and emotional scenes without ever saying one word beyond that fucking Ibsen text. Not a word.”
Even crew members had picked up on the tension, and one script supervisor asked Darlow, “Eh, have you noticed that they don’t, eh, seem to want to know each other?!” Ultimately, the unstoppable force did meet the immovable object, and Hopkins blew up in frustration. However, it wasn’t anywhere near as dramatic as Darlow had feared.
In the third week, the director finally plucked up the courage to suggest they begin work on the delicate third act, which is the most troublesome part of the play. After the two actors gave it their best shot on the first take, though, Darlow couldn’t help reacting, “Christ, that was crap.” He remembered Rigg agreeing with him that their efforts weren’t up to par, but Hopkins didn’t take the criticism so well.
The director claimed the future Silence of the Lambs icon “stormed off to the loo” – likely still stewing about his Hollywood career stalling, as much as he was specifically angry at Rigg, Darlow, or Ibsen’s seminal play.
