The only time Anthony Hopkins lost a role to Arnold Schwarzenegger: “Did he play the part?”
Celebrity doppelgängers are a reliable source of internet fodder.
Flawless symmetry can only yield so many permutations, after all, which is why you’ll find a seemingly endless list of famous lookalikes if you go hunting.
Matt Bomer and Henry Cavill are a classic, square-jawed combo. Amy Adams and Isla Fisher are similarly noteworthy, though the key to their similarities is all in the hair. Even Clark Gable and George Clooney have a remarkable resemblance, though one of them has been dead for more than six decades.
All of these couples pale in comparison, of course, to the most uncanny doppelgängers duo of them all: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Anthony Hopkins. Has anyone ever been able to tell them apart? Rumour has it that when Hopkins won the ‘Best Actor’ Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, it was actually Schwarzenegger who went on stage to collect it, and not a single person noticed.
In all seriousness, there is not much overlap between the diminutive Welshman and the Austrian bodybuilder-turned-action star-turned-governor. They’re only ten years apart in age, but one of them is known for his stage portrayals of Shakespeare characters, and one is known for playing a large metal murder machine. Hollywood is a strange place, though, so it’s only mildly surprising that these vastly different men would have been up for the same role at least once in their careers.
The question, then, is whether the role was a typically Schwarzeneggerian role or a typically Hopkinsian role. Did the future Governator turn down the chance to play a repressed, love-sick butler in Remains of the Day? Was the role of Dutch in the Predator franchise stolen right out from under Hopkins’s nose just as he was going through the necessary physical training to portray a special forces operator?
Fortunately, we do not have to speculate. Multiple sources (including Vulture) have reported that Joel Schumacher initially wanted Hopkins to play the role of the icy Batman & Robin villain Mr Freeze. He ultimately opted for Schwarzenegger not because of the actor’s remarkable physical resemblance to the Welshman but because he decided that the character needed to be massive.
If this is true, Hopkins doesn’t seem to have been aware of it at the time that Schumacher was doing his brainstorming. When asked about this delicious bit of trivia in an interview with GQ in 2021, the Oscar winner said, “Who’s Mr Freeze?” and then followed up with, “Oh, well, I wouldn’t mind looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger! Did he play the part?”
We can confidently say that Hopkins’s Mr Freeze would not have had the same measurements as Schwarzenegger’s version, but given that the key to the character’s appearance has more to do with blue sparkly body paint than muscle, they may actually have ended up looking pretty similar.
Schumacher’s version of the Batman comics is famously campy, and American camp loves middle-aged British actors. In this light, there is an argument to be made that the director made the wrong casting choice. But Schwarzenegger’s minimal acting talent and enormous physique really do add an extra element to the role. As insane as it sounds, the Austrian Oak probably was better than the two-time Oscar winner, and that’s really saying something.
