“I’m fed up”: the 1998 role that revived Anthony Hopkins’ career
While known for his powerful and commanding performances, Anthony Hopkins felt freed when he was allowed to have more fun.
Hopkins didn’t receive much notoriety for the first half of his career and seemed doomed to be ranked as an ‘underrated actor’ for his entire life, but it was his performance in the brilliant Jonathan Demme thriller The Silence of the Lambs, the first horror film to ever win ‘Best Picture’ at the Academy Awards, that he became a household name, and won his first Oscar for ‘Best Actor’.
Despite bringing to life one of the scariest movie villains of all time, Hopkins became best known for appearing in formal period costume dramas, as he made Howards End and The Remains of the Day shortly after. While it wasn’t unheard of for an older British actor with a background in Shakespearean theatre to be an expert in this field, Hopkins seemed like everyone’s first choice to play notable figures of authority; he even played two different United States presidents, as he was cast as John Quincy Adams in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad and Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone’s Nixon.
While no one did these roles quite like him, it was easy to forget that he had started off his career doing under-the-radar genre roles, with one of his earliest showcase performances being in George Romero’s highly unusual psychological thriller, Magic. Subsequently, he was given an opportunity to get back to his roots when Martin Campbell cast him in The Mask of Zorro, with the director admitting surprise at how well Hopkins embraced his role.
“I said to Anthony, ‘Why on earth are you playing Zorro?’” Campbell recalled, “He said, ‘I’m fed up with those Merchant-Ivory-type numbers where you’re dead from the knees up. I want to do a two-hour popcorn movie’.”
Zorro is a character who belongs to the public domain and can be adapted by any studio or filmmaker, similar to Robin Hood, King Arthur, Tarzan, or Sherlock Holmes, but 1998’s The Mask of Zorro felt like the definitive version because it created a clever origin story tied into a conspiracy to make California independent of the Union.
The most brilliant choice the film made was to make Zorro a persona that was adopted by multiple characters, with Hopkins playing the elder Zorro, who takes on a young man played by Antonio Banderas as his apprentice.
Campbell is no slouch when it comes to action films, and had more momentum than at any other point in his career because he was coming off the success of the James Bond film Goldeneye, which had revitalised the franchise. The Mask of Zorro was a classic case of swashbuckling adventure with brilliant sword fights and sharp humour, but the star power of Hopkins, Banderas, and a young Catherine Zeta-Jones turned it into a genuinely great film.
Despite being in his 60s at the time, Hopkins managed to be a compelling action hero and proved that he could go toe-to-toe with Banderas when it came to both acrobatics and charisma. Although Campbell, Banderas, and Zeta-Jones all returned for the sequel, The Legend of Zorro in 2005, it was a major disappointment that felt incomplete without Hopkins’ involvement.
