The movie Anthony Hopkins refused to talk about: “My agent thought it was a good idea”
Actors always have a degree of agency in how they navigate their careers, and that increases as they become more successful. However, Anthony Hopkins claimed he was talked into making a shite movie by his agent, and then, when he was asked about the movie being shite, he refused to talk about it.
As a distinguished knight of the realm with two Academy Award wins, Hopkins can be forgiven for making the odd duffer. That said, those duffers have become increasingly frequent in his dotage, enough to make anyone wonder how much money one elderly Welshman could possibly need.
Remember the thriller, Zero Contact, which was released as an NFT? What about The Virtuoso? Collide? Misconduct? Not ringing any bells? All of them debuted within the last decade, most of them barely enticed a set of eyeballs to watch them, but the veteran no doubt added a little bit extra to his bank balance.
On the other side of the coin, as the oldest-ever acting winner in Oscars history, Hopkins hasn’t lost a step. The Two Popes, One Life, and Freud’s Last Session continue indicating that he has no issues knocking out a powerhouse performance, which is why he’s allowed to voice alien robots in Rebel Moon.
He wasn’t quite so hot at the turn of the millennium, though, having cooled off significantly since his post-Hannibal Lecter pomp. He was still making decent-to-good movies, but he wasn’t as in-demand as he’d been throughout the 1990s, which helps explain what on earth he was doing in a Jerry Bruckheimer flick.
In 2002, Hopkins teamed up with Chris Rock, randomly enough, for Joel Schumacher’s Bad Company, a woeful espionage blockbuster that sees him as a shadowy CIA man who recruits Rock’s brash youngster because his identical twin brother, also a CIA operative, was killed in action. Dumb on paper, dumber in execution.
He knew it was doomed when he was making it after developing a habit of throwing new script pages in the bin, and hindsight hardly did the film any favours. “My agent thought it was a good idea,” he told The Standard. “And Chris happens to be a very good comic, and I happened to be a not very bad actor. He showed up on time. I showed up on time. He did his stuff, and I did mine. It’s as simple as that.”
Hopkins did not make Bad Company sound like a good time, and when he was pressed for his reactions to the movie bombing at the box office, failing so miserably among critics that it instantly took its place among the very worst entries in his filmography, and generally not being liked by anyone, he declined to comment.
Was he handsomely rewarded nonetheless? “I’m not Tom Cruise,” he spat. “I don’t make $20 million a picture. I’m not in that category, not in that class at all.” True, but he no doubt made a few million, and his agent would have taken a cut.
