The movies Anthony Hopkins enjoys making the least: “They’re awful, horrible things to do”
Anthony Hopkins has pretty much done it all. The Welsh actor made a name for himself on the stage first, treading the boards of some of the world’s most prestigious theatres. He was part of a new guard of Shakespearean actors in London in the 1960s, though he had the distinct advantage of having Sir Laurence Olivier as a mentor.
When he started working in movies and television, it was mainly within a similar milieu. His first major film role was in Anthony Harvey’s 1968 period drama, The Lion in Winter, playing opposite two of the heaviest of hitters, Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. Not all stage actors are able to adapt their dramatic skills to the big screen, but Hopkins proved to be a natural. When he went to Hollywood in the late-’70s, he began to take on a broader range of roles, proving that he could do more than Shakespeare.
Hopkins’ most famous role, of course, is as the utterly chilling cannibal Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 police procedural, The Silence of the Lambs. He was so good in it that he won an Oscar, even though the Academy has been historically allergic to handing out awards to horror-adjacent movies. He’s since been nominated another five times and won a second time for his role as an octogenarian sliding into dementia in Florian Zeller’s 2020 drama, The Father.
Over the years, he’s done comedy, horror, sci-fi, and Christmas movies. He’s played everyone from Hitler to Picasso and worked with directors from every corner of Hollywood, from David Lynch to Michael Bay. He knows a thing or two about the best and worst parts of the business, and he has strong opinions about which movies are enjoyable to work on and which are, quite frankly, an absolute nightmare.
Speaking to the BBC in 2004, the actor revealed that he can’t stand big-budget studio movies. Speaking of his relief about starting production on the John Madden movie Proof, Hopkins said, “I was so glad when I got it because the texture of it is so good. That’s what I enjoy doing, really. Because you can sometimes do a big, big blockbuster movie – I’ve done a couple of those – and they’re awful, horrible things to do.”
The timing of this statement is somewhat surprising since Hopkins’ time as a big-budget plug-and-play prestige hire was still years away. Contrary to what his distaste might have one believe, he has seemed to take on huge studio blockbusters with increasingly little discernment in recent years, taking on key roles in the Marvel franchise, a Transformers movie, and one of Zack Snyder’s worst Star Wars knock-offs.
He is far from the first Shakespearean actor to sell his soul to the Hollywood overlords. Even his mentor, Laurence Olivier, held his nose and took the paycheck a few times in the latter half of his career. He even played Zeus (in a shockingly similar performance to Hopkins’ Odin) in Desmond Davis’ cult classic Clash of the Titans in 1981, complete with gold tiara. And to Hopkins’ credit, he has at least managed to balance the hollow, big-budget flicks with more intimate fare. Few other actors could go from voicing a mechanised battle robot in a Zack Snyder film to winning an Oscar for a nuanced portrayal of life with dementia.
