Another Chance At Lear
SAMPHIRE HOE, England — On the white cliffs of Dover, soldiers secured tents in what looked like a military encampment. A man appeared by one, his grizzled face shadowed by a ragged beard. “Shall we get on with it?” Anthony Hopkins said.
Mr. Hopkins, 80, has been getting on with the business of acting for almost 60 years. And on a chilly day last November, he was about to shoot his final scene as King Lear in the new made-for-television film of Shakespeare’s tragedy, now out on Amazon Prime Video.
This “King Lear” — a production from the BBC and Amazon and co-starring Emma Thompson, Emily Watson, Florence Pugh and Andrew Scott — is directed by Richard Eyre, who also adapted the text, shrinking a play that usually runs three hours or more into an action- driven 115 minutes. Mr. Eyre has placed his Lear in a contemporary Britain where the king is a military dictator. Viewers are first greeted with sweeping views of the skyscrapers of the London skyline, before Mr. Eyre’s camera alights on the Tower of London, a symbol of might since William the Conqueror erected fortifications on the site in 1066.
And Mr. Hopkins’s Lear is at first every bit the tyrant; a gruff, arrogant man used to obedience and obeisance. Or as he put it pithily between takes, “a punchy old guy.”
It’s a bit of a shock to see Mr. Hopkins playing Lear at all; after all, he had forsworn the stage (and Shakespeare, for the most part) nearly 30 years ago. But time, and the rise of prestige TV, spurred him to tackle the role once again.
Mr. Hopkins took on the challenging part in a 1986 production at London’s National Theater, directed by David Hare. “It was a terrific production, but I soon realized I wasn’t going to hit the mark,” Mr. Hopkins said. “It’s not enough just to have muscular, lumpen energy to play Lear. Or any part.” Soon after Lear, he played Antony to Judi Dench’s Cleopatra.
Mr. Hopkins is best known for his film roles, most indelibly his Oscar-winning turn as the serial killer Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the Lambs,” from 1991. He also returned to television in recent years, starring in the HBO series “Westworld.”
Ms. Thompson, who has starred alongside Mr. Hopkins before, in “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day,” said that the actors felt “privileged to witness him tackle the part.”
“There was this sense of something ultimate, an apogee of some kind,” she added. “Tony is one of our greatest actors, and here he was, playing one of the greatest roles ever written.”
Mr. Hopkins brushed aside these accolades. “You have to be very careful about the narcissism of the lead actor,” he said. “What I liked about Richard’s ‘Lear’ was the lack of ceremony, no kowtowing and bowing. I liked the raw, brutal approach; come in, speak your lines and get off.”
He added: “I was trying too hard the first time. Now I have more experience, and I wanted to prove I had the stamina and the chutzpah. As Goethe said, every old man knows what Lear is about.”