Bridging the faith
Pryce and Hopkins play a pair of pontiffs in imagined version of historic meetings
One must be cautious about ascribing fate, destiny or a higher power to the casting of a movie, but what are the odds that Pope Francis I would have a celebrity look-alike? Long before Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles started working on the biopic The Two Popes, others had noted the striking similarities between the pontiff and Jonathan Pryce, who plays him in the film.
“And I felt he had the same energy as Pope Francis,” says Meirelles, attending the Canadian première of the film at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
It’s a mix of humility and joy. “Pope Francis, he likes jokes, and Jonathan Pryce has it as well, so some of the jokes come from him.” This includes a lighthearted moment in the film when Francis asks a cardinal in the Vatican if he has a spare hat. “This is Jonathan! The funny stuff came from him.”
The Two Popes tells the story of the meetings between Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who would become Francis I in 2013 after the first abdication in 600 years.
Playing “straight Pope” to Pryce’s jovial priest is Anthony Hopkins, whose research into Benedict XVI uncovered such wonderful details as his love of the soft drink Fanta and his fanship of a 1990s German/ Austrian TV show called Kommissar Rex, about a crime-solving German shepherd. (That show was loosely the inspiration for the current Canadian cop show Hudson & Rex.)
“They’re brilliant actors,” says Meirelles of his two Popes. “I had worked with (Hopkins) before (in a 2011 thriller called 360), so I trusted him. I knew he would deliver a great Benedict.” And in addition to Pryce’s skill as an actor — Meirelles notes his stellar work in 2017’s The Wife — Pryce’s Papal parallels kept popping up.
“He has a problem in his knee, his right knee,” says the director. “And Pope Francis has the same problem. So they even walk the same way.”
The Two Popes was written by Anthony McCarten (The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour), adapted from his 2017 play The Pope. “He’s very good in biographies,” Meirelles notes mildly. Indeed: Both those earlier films were Oscar nominated for their screenplays, and The Two Popes could follow suit.
Of course, no one knows precisely what words flowed between the once and future pontiffs in their three meetings before the handover of power. But rather than make it all up, McCarten looked at what they had said in other contexts.
“The brilliance of the script is all they say in the film they did say, but in different ways. Anthony took all the dialogue from what they’ve written, and interviews. So most of the lines were really lines said by them. He was able to put together interviews and books and make it feel like a dialogue. So it’s Anthony’s script, but it’s also Francis’ and Benedict’s script.”
Meirelles describes himself as a lapsed Catholic, but says he felt a certain responsibility to the religion’s followers, and to its current head.
“I think they’ll like it because the film’s very honest,” he says. “We mention the problems of the Church, we mention Francis’ problems, we don’t hide anything, but ... the film’s also about forgiveness isn’t it? They need to forgive themselves their mistakes, and they need to be forgiven by the other.”
And Francis? “I shook hands with him,” the director says. He was once part of a small group who met personally with the Pope, and he quickly explained the film to Francis. “He said, ‘Oh, great!’” The director laughs. “He couldn’t care less! I hope he watches it, but if he does he won’t tell. Even with him, the Vatican is still a very secret institution. He’s trying to open it up but it’s like a secret society.”