“This guy’s dying”: the 1997 movie Anthony Hopkins thought might finish him
It can be easy to ignore those health issues that we think will just magically go away, but when you push yourself too hard, that’s usually when it all catches up with you, and Anthony Hopkins learned that the hard way.
In the late 1990s, he signed on to a film that required a fair bit of strenuous activity, nothing that he thought he couldn’t handle, but by the end, filming had to be put on pause, namely because Alec Baldwin put up a fight to not want to see his co-star suffer.
Hopkins had been cast alongside him in The Edge, a survival thriller in which the pair played survivors of a plane crash who soon become targets of a bloodthirsty bear, so, rather ironically, while playing a man fighting to survive, he found himself wrestling with his own health. There came a moment when he realised what’s really important, and that’s getting medical help, not continuing filming a movie about trying to survive a killer bear.
The actor once explained the scary ordeal, writing, “I woke up one morning and collapsed. I thought I was having a heart attack; I was in such severe pain. I went down on one knee. I was taken to the hospital in Los Angeles and diagnosed with a herniated disc. The doctor said, ‘I’m not going to operate. Just rest, and it’ll go away’. Well, I didn’t take his advice. I drove straight up to Canada to begin working on The Edge.”
We’ve all been guilty of thinking we know our body better than the doctor and ignoring their advice, not taking pills we have been prescribed, convinced that the issue will just clear up on its own.
While some people are certainly much more on it with their health than others, for a busy Hollywood star, clearly, there’s not always time. Hopkins was going to make The Edge, even if it nearly killed him; perhaps he just really wanted to experience working alongside a real bear, the trained Bart the Bear from Legends of the Fall, to be precise.
Hopkins continued his story, explaining how, “As part of my preparation, I had to take swimming lessons, which inflamed the disc again”. He knew he shouldn’t have pushed himself, because, “By the time we started shooting, I was in excruciating pain. When he saw me in agony, Alec Baldwin stopped the shoot. ‘You can’t go on doing this’,” he told me. ‘It’s not worth it’.”
It was Baldwin whose concern really sealed the deal for Hopkins, and he was going to get help. “Then he went to the producers and said, ‘Listen, this is two hours of popcorn we’re making. Meanwhile, this guy’s dying. Get him into the hospital or I’m going to walk off the picture’,” the actor revealed.
So, after getting himself back on the horse, Hopkins finished filming, and the movie was released to relative success, although it certainly isn’t one of his most memorable works. Perhaps he should’ve just sat it out altogether and actually let himself recover properly. I guess he just can’t sit still.
