The one movie Anthony Hopkins will always regret making: “I don’t know why I did that film”
One of the best things about Anthony Hopkins is that, despite being one of the United Kingdom’s greatest-ever actors and a record-breaking Academy Award winner, it’s hard to figure out which one he hates the most: actors, the acting business, or the movie business in general.
Even at the beginning of his career, when he was taking his first steps into cinema after making a name for himself in the theatre, Hopkins was at odds between his chosen profession and the people who populated it. He always wanted to make a living in the performing arts; the only notable downside was that he seemed to despise everyone else who did.
When he was a younger man, Hopkins would regularly butt heads with directors and co-stars, a fractious personality that many attributed to his lengthy battle with alcoholism. However, he’s been clean and sober since the mid-1970s and hasn’t mellowed with age, with the star continuing to rail against awards season and blockbuster cinema, two things he’s become very familiar with.
It wasn’t until The Silence of the Lambs that Hopkins truly broke through to the mainstream, and even then, he voiced his regrets over playing the iconic villain more than once. It’s hard to turn down those multi-million paycheques, to be fair, but there was one movie he really wished he hadn’t made at all.
Even though it was directed by Richard Attenborough, 1978’s Magic was an American film. It was originally developed by Norman Jewison with Jack Nicholson eyed for the lead role, and when it passed onto Steven Spielberg, he considered Robert De Niro for the leading role of Corky.
Ultimately, Hopkins played a failed magician who finds a second wind when he debuts a new act with a ventriloquist’s dummy called Fats. It sounds like a comedic premise, but Magic was a horror-tinged psychological thriller that placed its protagonist on the precipice of a breakdown from start to finish.
Even though it earned him Golden Globe and Bafta nominations, Hopkins could never shake the fact that a working-class Welshman wasn’t the right choice to embody a troubled magician who flees to the Catskills region of New York to rehabilitate his personal and professional lives.
“I don’t know why I did that film,” he confessed to Playboy. “They should have gone to somebody else, an American actor, a New York actor like Al Pacino.” Awards recognition indicates that he wasn’t terrible in the role despite his misgivings, even if Pauline Kael became one of Magic‘s most vocal detractors.
She was one of her era’s most prominent critics, not that Hopkins was aware. “Who’s this?” he asked. “Never heard of her.” In classic fashion, he used Kael as an example of one of the many things he detests about his industry, admitting he’s “always wary of knowledgeable people who are very critical.”
He thought he was miscast, but how did he feel about critics trashing his performance? “It’s bullshit,” he stated. “These endless analyses of films.” He can hate his own work, but apparently, reviewers can’t.
