“I never knew what was going on”: why Anthony Hopkins’ first American movie left him “baffled”
Anthony Hopkins’ attitude toward acting has always been simple: do your prep, arrive on time, say your lines, move on to the next thing. No fuss, no muss.
Imagine his surprise, then, when he signed up for his first American movie, and found the entire production bending over backwards to cater to its leading lady. This beloved star had been nominated for ‘Best Actress’ at the Academy Awards only a few years earlier, yet when she worked with Hopkins, he couldn’t believe how she conducted herself. In fact, he was so disgusted with what he saw as a lack of discipline that, in an interview conducted the year after the movie was released, he claimed that she should have been fired.
In case you can’t tell, Hopkins didn’t exactly have a great time shooting 1974’s The Girl from Petrovka, a screwball comedy that cast him as a KGB agent desperate to throw a spanner in the works of a romance between a Russian ballet dancer (Goldie Hawn) and an American journalist. Prior to working on this movie, Hopkins had plied his trade primarily in the theatre, as well as British films and television shows. To him, there was a dedication to professionalism in Britain that helped its productions tick over like a well-oiled machine. This Hollywood debacle, though, was a wildly different kettle of fish.
“I was always baffled that people could be an hour late on set and no one would dare ask questions,” he raged in Anthony Hopkins: The Authorised Biography. “You’d be there and notice much hurrying and scurrying, people looking at their watches, awful silences…followed by whispering.”
This panicked display, which took place more than once, was usually brought about by Hawn’s inability to arrive on time, and Hopkins saw this as a classic Hollywood power game being played by someone who was testing the boundaries of their star power. In essence, she knew everyone would wait for her, so she made them wait. “I never knew what was going on,” Hopkins added with a grimace, “but it was all very time-wasting.”
Clearly, even this early in his career, Hopkins prided himself on never being dragged into any Hollywood actor bullshit. He always saw acting as a job as much as an artistic expression, so he endeavoured to be as prepared as he possibly could be at all times. He’d be committed to doing his work as efficiently as he could and would serve the director’s vision in any way that was asked of him. Oh, and he’d never engage in any time-consuming, emotionally and physically draining method acting, because he hated self-indulgence, and knew method actors could make sets very inefficient indeed.
So, when he saw Hawn arrive late to set, without her lines memorised, it was like a red flag to a bull. Hopkins simply couldn’t understand why this was being allowed, and it gave him a very poor first impression of Hollywood. “I don’t care how you get prepared, even if it’s standing on your head in the morning, as long as you’re prepared,” Hopkins declared in ‘75. “Acting is basically a craft, and an actor has to know his craft. Any actor who doesn’t, and gets paid an enormous amount of money like Goldie Hawn did…shouldn’t have the job.”
Yes, Hopkins – never one to mince his words, even back then – felt Hawn should have thrown off the set by director Robert Ellis Miller for wasting everyone’s time, and been replaced by somebody else. “There’s no mystery to acting,” he insisted, “And actors like Monroe or Hawn have brought an appalling reputation to the whole profession.” Oof. Maybe “baffled” is the wrong word to describe Hopkins’ impression of working on The Girl from Petrovka. “Furious” sounds way more accurate.
