The Netflix character “unashamedly” based on Anthony Hopkins: “Steal from another local boy”
You know you’ve made it when people can’t help but copy your style, which is a blessing and a curse; just like when the popular kid accidentally starts a trend at school, a mixture of pride and annoyance surely bubbles to the surface when an actor is unashamedly copied.
There are just certain actors who inspire copycats, simply because they’re just too good to be ignored. Sure, people should be more original sometimes, but you can’t help getting inspired when you stumble across the perfect performance, which leads actors to actually learning their craft.
Anthony Hopkins has reigned as one of the most lauded actors in Hollywood since he broke through into the mainstream. He’d already spent years honing his craft on the stage, which prepared him for the big screen, and soon he’d picked up Oscars, worked with acclaimed directors, and become an untouchable cinematic force, able to play terrifying villains to an ageing pope and everything in between.
It’s villainous characters that Hopkins is perhaps best known for, though, because who can forget his performance as Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, which saw him turn a cold-blooded killer and cannibal, but one with a surprising amount of charm and intellect. Lecter is one of horror’s most iconic antagonists that you can’t help but love, simply because Hopkins played him so well.
Balancing unhinged, humorous tendencies with genuine fear, you never know what Lecter will say or do, and since Hopkins’ performance in the film, which unsurprisingly won him an Oscar (even making it one of the first horror movies to win an Academy Award), he has inspired countless actors. You can see traces of Lecter in other horror villains, with the sophisticated nature of someone like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, for example, certainly drawing parallels, but more recently, though, a particular Netflix series has given us a character directly inspired by Lecter, with actor Matthew Rhys admitting that he took a lot from Hopkins to master his role.
In an interview with the BBC, the actor revealed how the character inspired his role as Nile Jarvis in the new series The Beast in Me, which sees him play a man suspected of murdering his wife.
When Nile moves in next door to the grief-stricken writer Aggie, played by Claire Danes, tension begins to mount when she decides to pen a book about him. To master his character, Rhys admitted that he “unashamedly went back to Anthony Hopkins’ performance in The Silence of the Lambs, because, you know, if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best, steal from another local boy”.
“There’s a number of things I totally stole, unashamedly. I turned up on set, the first day, with a boiler suit and the slicked back hair and the mask, and they were like: ‘Take it off, what are you doing? Stop talking like that. Why do you keep going [Lecter hissing sound]?’” he joked.
He might not have actually done that, of course, but Rhys certainly borrowed that intelligent cunningness that Hopkins does so well as Hannibal the cannibal, and you can’t blame him for that, really. It’s the ultimate performance to refer to for such roles, and Rhys has received praise for his portrayal of Nile, so it seems like he chose the right performer to steal from.
