“He knows how to do it”: Anthony Hopkins names Hollywood’s only “real actors”
When it comes to acting, Sir Anthony Hopkins knows a thing or two about a thing or two. He’s worked in theatre, film, and television for more than six decades, after all, and there’s very little he hasn’t seen or experienced.
Over the years, Hopkins has worked with everyone who is anyone in Hollywood and has seen a huge number of young stars with huge buzz attached to them come and go. He has admitted that, in his younger days, he was full of the same piss and vinegar as some of the young hopefuls who crossed his path but soon burned out. However, he eventually came to be at peace with his profession when he realised something profound: it’s not that serious.
“I’ve been doing this for 60 years,” Hopkins told Montecristo magazine in 2021. “I don’t know anything about acting, I don’t know what it is. It’s all like a con job. It’s not important. People that are important are people in hospitals—nurses, doctors. I used to think it was important. Now, I just learn my lines, show up, and do it.”
While this may sound slightly facetious, as Hopkins has enjoyed a globetrotting career that has made him many, many more millions than all those important doctors and nurses, and great acting is certainly more complicated than simply saying lines in the right order, his sentiment about the craft is pretty interesting.
In the past, the iconic Silence of the Lambs star has railed against method acting, arguing that there is no need for an actor to suffer for their art, or to make others suffer by staying in character at all times while on a movie set. In his eyes, acting, at its core, is much more straightforward than that, and there’s no need to overcomplicate it if you don’t have to. Few stars understand this, though, which is why Hopkins claimed there are only a few ‘real’ actors out there who approach the craft as he does.
“It’s easy,” Hopkins claimed of his job, no doubt sending countless struggling students into a state of abject disbelief. Then, using his Oscar-nominated role as the emotionally repressed butler James Stevens in 1993’s The Remains of the Day as an example, Hopkins shrugged, “If you play a butler, you don’t go around shouting. You’re in a big house—you are quiet, you are still.” He recalled people asking him how he stayed so captivatingly still as Stevens, both emotionally and physically, and he laughed, “Well, you don’t move. It’s just common sense.”
In Hopkins’ eyes, the best actors are the ones capable of harnessing this low-key approach on-screen. To him, exaggerated displays of ACTING – all emotional outbursts and playing to the rafters – are the wrong approach for screen acting. They may work on stage, where you must calibrate your performance so the people in the back row feel it, but when you’re performing for a movie camera, a ‘less is more’ approach is infinitely preferable.
“You take an actor like Clint Eastwood in a movie like Unforgiven or Dirty Harry,” Hopkins noted, deciding to give some examples of the stars who most intrinsically understand that the power of screen acting lies in communicating a lot by doing very little. “He knows how to do it. He knows that he doesn’t need to overact.”
In addition to Eastwood, a man whose dedication to underacting always made certain critics (absurdly) believe he couldn’t actually act, Hopkins also pinpointed Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Edward G Robinson. These Old Hollywood stars were famed for their noir/gangster roles, and Hopkins loved their naturalistic, low-key styles. He claimed, “Those are the real actors. Those are the ones I encourage young actors to watch.”
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