The director Anthony Hopkins called a “genius”
With a career of genuine magnificence spanning over six decades, Anthony Hopkins has established himself as one of the undoubted greatest actors of all time. Countless stultifying performances in which he has truly embodied his characters have proven his seemingly endless talent.
Whether playing the violent yet empathetic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, Professor Abraham Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or simply any of the widely-ranging characters he has mastered, Hopkins has seemed to immerse himself in his roles, practically disappearing into his many fictional lives.
Naturally, then, Hopkins has been afforded the opportunity to work with some of the most prominent directors of all time, such as David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg. Rather amazingly, Hopkins once added Michael Bay to such a list of greats, with whom he collaborated on 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight.
“I saw the first two, and then, when I heard I was doing this, I caught up, and so I’ve seen them all now,” Hopkins once told Yahoo of his experience with the Transformers franchise. “They are terrific; they are created by a genius, all those machines and those Transformers created by Michael.”
The legendary actor continued, “He was telling me about the work he did on them and how he would refine them and go into the special effects guys and design them and get the details of the light on the metal and all that. He told me all that at breakfast before I started on the film.”
Bay’s films are admittedly rather different from those that Hopkins is used to starring in. Known for his big-budget, high-octane action movies like Armageddon, Bad Boys, Pearl Harbour and the Transformers franchise, Bay embodies the cinema of spectacle with works that sometimes favour style over substance.
Such films do not necessarily garner critical admiration, but they certainly draw big audiences, and Bay is one of the highest-grossing directors of all time, a testament to his prowess as a filmmaker and his ability to bring cutting-edge special effects and explosive action sequences onto the big screen.
Offering his overall thoughts on Bay, Hopkins then compared him to some of American cinema’s all-time greats, noting, “I thought, ‘This guy’s a genius, he really is.’ He’s of the same ilk as Oliver Stone, Spielberg, and Scorsese; they’re brilliant savants, really, they are. I mean, he is a savant.”
As for how Hopkins found Bay’s on-set atmosphere, he admitted that things were a little faster than he was used to but that he developed an excellent relationship with the director. “Oh, well, you move fast; you don’t have time to think,” he said. “And you know, he’s very good, and we got to really like each other.”
