The two icons who ruined acting forever, according to Anthony Hopkins: “You’ll have no career”
It’s not out of the ordinary for Anthony Hopkins to be found bemoaning the current state of acting, since he’s spent almost his entire career commenting on how much he despises the people who do it for a living. Remarkably, he’s managed to make it the habit of a lifetime without sounding like a hypocrite.
In most cases, someone who works in a certain profession and repeatedly slates other people who do the exact same thing for a living would fail to see the irony in their ire, but Hopkins has always made it clear that he loves the art of acting itself, he just hates most of the things that come with it.
He might have calmed down a lot from his wayward younger days, but the two-time Academy Award winner still comes across as a furious old man on occasion. When he casts his eye across the filmic landscape, he sees a lot of things that he doesn’t like, and he puts much of the blame on two people.
His approach has always been meticulous; when Hopkins gets a script, he reads it as many times as required to memorise his lines, which can run into the hundreds, so that he’s completely prepared by the time he steps onto the set. He’s never favoured the method, and continues to bemoan two of its most famous students.
“Young actors tend to mumble,” he offered. “I know they’re trying to do Marlon Brando, but Brando was the greatest technician of all. He understood everything. He was a very smart man, and he knew how to do it.’ When he was working with one of those pesky youths, he opted to offer some sage advice.
“I said, ‘You’ll have no career left if you’re mumbling. Your part in this film is to tell a story,'” he mused. “The art in this film is to tell a story. It’s nothing to do with makeup or being late on set. You’re paid to be there on time or go. The audience has paid you, otherwise, you may as well go to the park next door. You can’t work like that.”
It wasn’t just Brando who ended up in the firing line, though, with Hopkins dragging James Dean into the conversation: “I was working with a young actor a few years ago, a young Canadian actor who looked a bit like James Dean. I think he thought he was James Dean.” Again, he suggested that mumbling wouldn’t cut it, and he was ignored. What became of the unnamed performer? “Never heard of him since.”
He isn’t the only one who thinks that Brando did more harm than good to acting, with Matt Damon and Christoph Waltz another pair of Oscar winners who think he’s inspired future generations in the worst possible way, so you can’t say that Hopkins is being an older fella who fails to comprehend the latest trends, especially when the Godfather star and Dean burst onto the scene in the 1950s.
Whereas he believes the current crop mumble for the sake of mumbling, the Welshman thinks they’re missing the point, since “Brando and Dean and all those guys, all those so-called ‘great’ method actors, they knew what they were doing,” and the 21st-century mob do not, apparently.
