The moment Anthony Hopkins refused to learn his lines: “I’m throwing these pages in the trash”
It only takes a quick glance through his filmography to reveal that Anthony Hopkins has never been a man opposed to taking a paycheque gig. Indeed, from almost the moment he finally achieved worldwide fame as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Hopkins has lent his gravitas to mainstream fare with remarkable regularity.
From The Mask of Zorro to Mission: Impossible II, Red Dragon to Fracture, and Thor to Transformers: The Last Knight, if you’ve got a big-budget thriller or action movie that has a part for Sir Tony, he’ll be there. In truth, Hopkins’ willingness to use his classical training to star in what other thespians may consider to be lowest common denominator Hollywood money-spinners is perfectly reflective of his attitude toward acting. Namely, it’s a job, he’s good at it, and if you properly remunerate him for it, he’ll add some class to your picture.
Naturally, Hopkins’s matter-of-fact outlook on his profession, coupled with his propensity for turning up in dreck like Red 2 and The Wolfman, has led to accusations over the years that he can sometimes phone it in. Indeed, it’s hard to deny the truth of this in certain instances, such as his admission that he found parading around as Odin in Thor to be, shall we say, creatively unfulfilling.
“They put me in armour; they shoved a beard on me,” he groused to The New Yorker. “Sit on the throne, shout a bit. If you’re sitting in front of a green screen, it’s pointless acting it.” Naturally, he returned twice more to this pointless, but lucrative, role.
However, there are times when it’s possible to have some sympathy for Hopkins. For instance, when he signed up to star opposite Chris Rock in Joel Schumacher’s lamentable 2002 spy action comedy Bad Company, he probably felt he was in good hands for this kind of thing. Schumacher, after all, had directed a handful of hit legal thrillers and two Batman movies, while producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies were extremely reliable moneymakers. Between ’95 and ’00 alone, he produced Crimson Tide, Dangerous Minds, The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon, Coyote Ugly, and Gone in 60 Seconds, all of which hoovered up cash at the worldwide box office.
Unfortunately, though, Hopkins happened to sign up for the one movie that finally stopped the Bruckheimer gravy train in its tracks. Bad Company was critically reviled, with most observers simply wondering how big the paycheque had to have been to convince Hopkins to lower himself to such material. It also became the first Bruckheimer movie in a long time to fail to make back its budget at the box office, which was the entire impetus for making the film in the first place.
In truth, Hopkins likely had a bad feeling about the movie from the very start, especially when he was confronted with script rewrites almost every day. This is usually a sign that the creative vision of a project isn’t aligned, and after a while, Hopkins became so frustrated with the expectation of learning new lines on the spot that he said enough was enough.
“If rewrites come in time, then I can learn them,” he reasoned to Total Film in 2006, before grumbling that only on-set rewrites boil his blood. He revealed that Bruckheimer would repeatedly furnish him with new dialogue, and it pissed him off so much that one day he exploded, “Why are you doing this? Are you trying to torture us? I want you to know that I’m throwing these new pages in the trash.”
Perhaps the chastened producer realised the error of his ways after this outburst, or maybe he simply didn’t want to get chewed out by Sir Anthony Hopkins again. Whatever the case, the wry star noted, “He stopped giving them to me after that.”
