The boring movie that saw Anthony Hopkins cause chaos to amuse himself: “It does go on, doesn’t it?”
Even at the ripe old age of 84, Anthony Hopkins is still an actor who has never completely lost the irrepressible sense of mischievousness that has characterised much of his on and off-screen career. He has always been an actor who doesn’t take things too seriously and has never been afraid to speak his mind if he feels others are taking the fun out of movie-making. In fact, he once revealed that he was so bored by making a film that he caused chaos for the director, who was unwilling to compromise on his tedious insistence on shooting endless takes for every shot.
During a Guardian interview in 2022, Hopkins was on top form. He began by reminiscing about Jonathan Demme casting him in his signature role of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, revealing that the director thought some of his choices were eccentric. He smiled, “I don’t know why Jonathan cast me, but he trusted me. He would fall about laughing because he thought I was outrageous.”
For example, when putting together the iconic scene in which Jodie Foster’s nervous FBI agent Clarice Starling meets the infamous cannibal killer for the first time, Hopkins had a brainwave. He wanted to stand perfectly straight and still in the middle of his glass cell instead of sitting down to wait for her to arrive. When Demme asked why, he replied, “He can smell her, you see.” To this, he claimed Demme laughed, “Oh, my God. You’re really strange, Hopkins!”
Interestingly, though, it was while working on a different movie altogether that Hopkins became – by his own admission – a “troublemaker”.
In 2019, Hopkins spoke with two-time co-star Brad Pitt about their careers for Interview magazine and revealed that they couldn’t have behaved more differently on the set of their 1998 romantic drama Meet Joe Black. He told Pitt, “I’m so honoured that you’re doing this because you have this natural power of life in you. On Meet Joe Black, you were very quiet, and you didn’t cause any trouble. I was the troublemaker on that set.”
Pitt revealed he was going through a tough time in his personal life while making that film, which might have explained his subdued behaviour. Hopkins, though? He was his usual devil-may-care self. His main beef was director Martin Brest’s notorious tendency to make his actors perform endless takes of the same scene – and he let him know it.
Hopkins told The Guardian, “Marty Brest, the director – lovely man – he would do take after take after take. I never knew why. I said to him one day, ‘I don’t have much longer to live. Can we finish the scene?'” It doesn’t seem like Brest got the joke, though – and made no effort to reduce his demands. Hopkins lamented, “It was crazy. He’d say, ‘One more.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’m going home now, I’m tired.'”
Hopkins’ dismay with Brest’s process must have led to some tense days on set because he admitted, “Brad may have thought I was being a bit difficult. But I was convinced we’d never get to the end.”
In the end, Meet Joe Black wasn’t received in the same way as Hopkins and Pitt’s first collaboration, Legends of the Fall. While it did decent numbers at the box office, it was critically lambasted from all corners, with Pitt, in particular, receiving a lot of flak. For his part, Pitt later confessed to EW, “I dogged it. I muffed it. I shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” He even dubbed the film “the pinnacle of my loss of direction and compass”.
As for Hopkins, he came out of the movie smelling of roses – and even enjoyed a sly joke at its expense. When The Guardian suggested many audiences felt like the three-hour slog of a film would never end, he got that mischievous twinkle in his eye again and quipped, “It does go on, doesn’t it?”
