The “simple” role Anthony Hopkins only took for the money: “It doesn’t take a genius to do that”
For someone who’s always hated actors, Anthony Hopkins turned out to be a pretty good one. Even now, in the twilight years of his career, he’s shown that he’s still capable of pulling a performance out of the top drawer, but he also isn’t averse to taking the money and running.
Since turning 80, he’s been nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in The Two Popes, went one better and claimed his second ‘Best Actor’ prize for The Father to become the oldest winner in Oscars history, and delivered acclaimed turns in One Life and Freud’s Last Session.
At the other end of the cinematic spectrum, he’s done daft shit like take top billing in the awful techno thriller, Zero Contact, which was released as an NFT, voiced a robot in Zack Snyder’s horrendous Rebel Moon duology, and hammed it up in Michael Bay’s Transformers: The Last Knight.
Hopkins is entitled to weave between prestige projects and utter nonsense, though, having dedicated his life to acting and becoming one of the United Kingdom’s greatest ever as a result. It’s always obvious when he’s phoning it in, though, but because he’s always been a no-frills kind of guy who calls it as he sees it, he doesn’t even bother trying to hide it.
In only his second recurring episodic role since 1989, Hopkins lent his gravitas to Roland Emmerich’s swords-and-sandals epic, Those About to Die, and it was an easy decision to make. His agent called, told him the title, informed him that he’d been offered the role of the Roman emperor, Vespasian, and he’d only be required to appear in seven of the ten episodes. He perused the scripts, and his mind was made up.
“I phoned him up and said, ‘I’ll do this. How much are they going to pay me?'” he said to The New Zealand Herald. “I thought this is a simple part to play. I showed up in Italy, and the only acting required from me was to be strong and dictatorial. That’s basically all I had to do. On a film, it’s the craftspeople, the designers, the people who do all the stuff to put my stupid face up on the screen, that’s what makes me, me. I don’t do anything. I just show up, have a cup of coffee, and they say, ‘Action.'”
In a typically frank fashion, Hopkins opined that “it doesn’t take a genius to do that,” and neither did For Those About to Die need him to bring his A-game. He’s far from terrible in it, mostly because he’s too good to be caught slumming it in an expensive period piece, but there is a hint of the two-time Oscar winner going through the motions every time he appears onscreen.
It would have been another added bonus for him to discover that he didn’t have to stick around for the duration, either, with his Vespasian getting bumped off well before the final episode. A simple role, a decent paycheque, and the chance to enjoy the slightly less hectic demands of television; what’s not to enjoy?
