The controversial 2003 role Anthony Hopkins would never get away with today: “I didn’t really care”
Obviously, the point of being an actor is to disappear into as many different roles as possible, but there’s always a line to be drawn, and there’s one performance that Anthony Hopkins would never be able to get away with today.
As one of the United Kingdom’s greatest-ever acting exports, not to mention a two-time Academy Award winner and knight of the realm, Hopkins has built his career on versatility and adaptability, although there has been a lot more phoning it in than usual in recent years, which is to be expected.
After all, he’s not a kick in the arse away from turning 90 years old, and having spent the last six decades giving acclaimed performance after acclaimed performance, the veteran is more than entitled to go where the money is and collect an easy paycheque, especially when his legacy is already well secured as a legend.
He’s played cannibalistic serial killers, popes, priests, vampire hunters, Sigmund Freud, butlers, Norse gods, United States presidents, swashbucklers, ventriloquists, and many more, but eyebrows were understandably raised in 2003 when the Welshman agreed to portray an African-American character.
While you could make the argument that it was somewhat necessary, considering the adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain, revolves around a professor being forced to resign from his position after being accused of making a racist remark, only for it to emerge that he’s a white-passing Black man who’s spent his professional life under the guise of a Jewish man, it was a contentious casting call.
Besides the obvious, there were also questions raised about hiring a British actor to inhabit the part of Coleman Silk, when the protagonist’s arc is so rooted in the African-American experience. It was an almost inevitable controversy, and while you should always hire the person best suited for the job, the younger version of the main character didn’t generate the same sort of outcry.
The young Silk was played by Wentworth Miller, whose father is of African-American and Jamaican descent, and from the outside looking in, that made it somewhat more palatable for him to play a white-passing Black man, at least in Hollywood terms. When Hopkins was quizzed on the furore, though, he didn’t give much of a shit.
“There were some remarks that I wasn’t rightly cast,” the erstwhile Hannibal Lecter acknowledged. “I didn’t really care what I looked like. I thought I didn’t have time for that. I thought I did the best I could. I changed the colour of my eyes.” He was focused on the acting, but even that wasn’t up to scratch.
The Human Stain was largely greeted with a shrug of indifference from critics, and one of the recurring themes of the film’s reception was that Hopkins was woefully miscast. He tried his best, as he tends to do when he’s not got his eyes solely on the financial prize, but it felt like a doomed errand, and it’s something you can’t imagine the industry even attempting today.
