The “very strange” actor Anthony Hopkins hated working with: “I’ve had enough of this shit”
It was inevitable that Anthony Hopkins would have a few run-ins with co-stars and colleagues over the years, seeing as he’s openly hated actors since the 1960s.
As oxymoronic as it sounds coming from someone who decided to make it their life’s work, he’s never budged on his stance. The two-time Academy Award winner loves the profession; he’s just always harboured a distaste for many of the people who occupy it.
It’s not just the performers, either. Hopkins despises awards ceremonies despite having attended more than his fair share over the years, he’s almost come to blows with several of his peers and a handful of directors, and he’s been open in lambasting the modern landscape for being all bells and no whistles.
It almost makes him sound like a glutton for punishment, especially in his early days when Hopkins’ notoriously fiery temper had him on a permanently short fuse. He’s slightly mellowed with age, though, even if he still hasn’t managed to shake the lingering feeling that he’s dedicated six decades to an industry full of snake oil salesmen, hypocrites, and liars.
The erstwhile Hannibal Lecter has encountered plenty of method actors, and while he’s one of the many who thinks the technique is filmic bullshit, he was forced to grin and bear it when he worked with Mickey Rourke on Michael Cimino’s 1990 thriller, Desperate Hours, describing his opposite number as “very strange.”
When shooting his very first scene, Rourke, who remained in character, thumped Hopkins on the shoulder, which sent him into a tizzy. “All I can remember was that this made me so angry, I punched the side of the car in genuine rage,” he recalled. “In fact, I punched it so hard, I knocked a dent in it.”
Even when they weren’t sharing scenes, he remembered Rourke getting “very violent on the set,” and things reached a head when he laid hands on his co-star again. “He was pushing me around once, and I suddenly thought, ‘I’ve had enough of this shit,’ and walked off the set,” Hopkins admitted.
He came back, obviously, because the film was finished and released to dire reviews and even worse box office, but the most ironic twist was yet to come. Even though he’d repeatedly punched, pushed, and left Hopkins bemused by his method antics, Rourke wrote him a “sweet note” at the end of production that made it sound like they’d actually been kindred spirits all along.
The letter revealed that “he doesn’t like actors much but had enjoyed working with me,” a feeling Hopkins could certainly identify with. Still, things reached a point where he’d actively dread going to work each day because he knew Rourke would be waiting to unleash his latest bout of unnecessary histrionics, and the fact that it was all in service of an instantly forgettable film made it even worse.
He wasn’t the first person to have issues with Rourke, and he definitely wasn’t the last, but at least he managed to emerge from Desperate Hours relatively unscathed.
