The two movies that almost made Anthony Hopkins quit acting: “Disturbing and distasteful”
Sometimes, actors play roles so well that their rendition of a certain type of person becomes the gospel for anyone else giving it a go. If you’re playing a mafia boss, you’ll watch Brando in The Godfather. If it’s a cowboy, you’ll study Clint Eastwood. And if you’ve landed a part as a serial killer, then there’s only one place to start: Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.
Often, scary films are diminished in their ability to shock thanks to the passing of time or our desensitisation to violence, but Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter is every bit as terrifying to witness now as it was when the film was released back in 1991.
It isn’t just the cool and collected persona in the face of unspeakable acts. It isn’t just the speech about eating people with a nice glass of Chianti. More than anything else, the reason watching Hopkins is so unsettling is the look in his eyes. Toward the start of the movie, there is a close-up shot of Lecter in his jail cell where he entreats Jodie Foster to come closer… closer… and as the camera zooms in on his face, you can see that he is plainly, utterly unhinged.
Just writing this it’s making me scared thinking about it to be honest, but also making me want to watch the movie again. It’s one that rewards repeated viewings, not only is it a fantastically tense film, with two superb central performances, it is also packed full of quotable lines, memorable set pieces and in Lecter you are watching an ‘all-time’ cinematic character, a Heath Ledger Joker, a Stallone in Rocky, a De Niro in Taxi Driver.
Lecter was such an immersive character for Hopkins that he struggled to separate himself from Thomas Harris’ creation, saying in the immediate years after making the film, “I think he is a little like me in a way. He’s a person in solitude and isolation. I am a bit of a solitude person – a solitary personality.”
And in the ten years between shooting the first film and its much-maligned 2001 sequel Hannibal, Hopkins made some movies that he failed to connect with at all, considering giving up his craft altogether, despite more than thirty years on stage and screen. That was despite putting in some of his career-best performances in the likes of The Remains of the Day and Nixon, both of which earned him Oscar nominations.
But after starring in the Brad Pitt movie Meet Joe Black in 1998 and the historical drama Titus a year later, Hopkins had seemingly had enough, describing acting as “disturbing and distasteful, a futile, wasteful life.”
Fortunately for movie fans, that wasn’t a belief he stuck to, and he has continued to put in fine shifts for the subsequent 25 years, including a second Oscar win for his work on psychological drama The Father in 2021 opposite Olivia Colman. Despite being well into his 80s, Hopkins has had a resurgence if anything over the past ten years, with award nominations for Westworld, King Lear and The Two Popes with Jonathan Pryce.
He has several projects on the way next year, including a movie about the founders of the car brand Maserati with Al Pacino, a film about Charles Darwin called The Species, and a Guy Ritchie film with Benedict Cumberbatch and James Norton named Wife and Dog.
