The role Anthony Hopkins called his best since Hannibal Lecter: “Different but as good”
He’s one of the United Kingdom’s greatest-ever acting exports, a record-setting Academy Award winner, and an all-around legend of stage and screen, but the defining role of Anthony Hopkins‘ career will always be The Silence of the Lambs‘ Hannibal Lecter.
Of course, there’s no shame in that when the disgraced psychiatrist with a taste for human flesh nabbed Hopkins his first trophy for ‘Best Actor’ as part of the third and so far final feature to make a clean sweep of the ‘Big Five’ categories at the Oscars, with Lecter embedding himself in the cultural consciousness in the process.
Hopkins has been delivering distinguished performances, whether it’s treading the boards or on the screen, since the early 1960s, and yet he’d be the first to admit he’s always going to be remembered first and foremost as the sinister and malevolent cannibal. It’s a status that nobody will begrudge him, apart from maybe Brian Cox, who played the character first and was immediately overshadowed.
He’s the oldest winner of an acting Oscar in the ceremony’s history; he’s been nominated six times in total, while his trophy cabinet also boasts six Baftas, two Primetime Emmys, an honorary Golden Globe, an Olivier Award, and two Tony nominations. It’s been a remarkable career and one that enjoyed an even more remarkable second wind after Kenneth Branagh’s Marvel Comics adaptation Thor shook Hopkins out of his self-induced stupor and reinvigorated his love for the craft.
By his own admission, the veteran played Lecter two more times than he should have, but he did find a spiritual successor of sorts. Ever since The Silence of the Lambs, casting directors have been inundating Hopkins with offers to play cold, calculating, and sinister figures with a hint of genius and a dash of madness, although there was only one character he placed on a similar pedestal.
In Gregory Hoblit’s 2007 psychological legal thriller Fracture, Hopkins’ Ted Crawford pits his wits against Ryan Gosling’s Willy Beachum. The latter is an ambitious lawyer who thinks he’s stumbled upon an easy win when the former’s wealthy engineer confesses to shooting his adulterous wife and leaving her for dead. However, Crawford is a much worthier adversary than first thought, instigating a dangerous game of cat and mouse.
“This film, I liked because the script was so good,” Hopkins told Radio Free of Fracture. “It was different but as good, I think, as Silence of the Lambs, and it’s all to do with structure. People will say, ‘Why did you do this part?’ And I usually say, ‘Money’, or something like that. Then I read the script, and I phoned my agent back after page 35, and I said, ‘This is really good’. So I finished the script. It’s one of those scripts that you don’t get very often.”
Not only did the screenplay win him over, but Hopkins called it “the best script I’d had since Silence of the Lambs.” It may not have been anywhere near as successful, but Fracture did win strong notices from critics and recoup its budget nine times over at the box office, so it was an unqualified success in every respect.
