“I don’t think it would have been helpful”: the 2007 movie Anthony Hopkins wanted nothing to do with
Like countless other veteran actors, Anthony Hopkins has become increasingly partial to an easy paycheque in his dotage, but there are still certain lines that he’ll refuse to cross.
Of course, it isn’t as if the veteran has thrown in the towel and started slumming it, since he’s been nominated for two Academy Awards since turning 80, making history the second time around when The Father made him the oldest-ever winner of a competitive acting Oscar.
More recent performances in One Life and Freud’s Last Session showed there was still plenty of gas left in the tank, but on the other hand, his reasons for boarding Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon, Michael Bay’s Transformers: The Last Knight, and his stint as Marvel Studios’ Odin were hardly artistic.
Still, Hopkins has his limits, and returning to the most iconic well of his career was one of them. Even though he’d been acting for well over 20 years at that point, it wasn’t until his unforgettable turn as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs that the Welshman became a Hollywood star.
When author Thomas Harris wrote more books, it was inevitable that there would be more movies. Compared to its predecessor, Hannibal was a damp squib, and Red Dragon was such a misfire that Hopkins admitted he never should have made either of them, with hindsight informing him that the cannibalistic killer would have been much better served as a one-and-done character.
However, because this is cinema we’re talking about, no marketable property is ever allowed to gather dust for too long. Harris’ prequel novel, Hannibal Rising, was published in January 2006, and by February 2007, the feature-length adaptation was in cinemas, with the late Gaspard Ulliel taking over the title role.
When the needless and utterly redundant origin story was first announced to be heading to the big screen in late 2006, it was revealed that Hopkins was expected to return as Lecter in an off-screen capacity to serve as the narrator. Somewhere along the line, those plans changed, and as Gaspard revealed at the time, the original Hannibal even declined a meeting.
“I discussed this with the producers, and they said they would organise a meeting with Anthony Hopkins and me,” Lecter 2.0 explained. “We couldn’t manage to do it. Anyway, I don’t think it would have been helpful for me, because I think every actor has is own way of working, and I don’t know if Mr Hopkins would have told me how he worked on his character, I don’t know if he wants to reveal that kind of stuff.”
Ironically, any time Hopkins has talked about his process, he matter-of-factly boils it down to remembering his lines and saying the words, and that’s about it, so he probably wouldn’t have been too helpful anyway. Either way, it’s clear that those in power wanted him involved with Hannibal Rising in at least some capacity, but he wasn’t interested.
