THE DARK KNIGHT
Hannibal Lecter? Not even close to being my best role. Retire? If I stopped working I would die. Regrets about the years lost to booze? No, that’s life. In a magnificently no-nonsense interview laced with black humour, Anthony Hopkins says he’s buried his
With his 80th birthday on the horizon, Anthony Hopkins should be pondering a well-earned rest to do what the hell he damn well likes.
But Hopkins isn’t having any of it. The word ‘retirement’ is met with the same chilling stare that kept Jodie Foster (as FBI student Clarice Starling) on her toes in The Silence Of The Lambs.
‘If I stopped working I feel I would die,’ he says. ‘I don’t want it to be over, so you are stuck with me. I feel good, I work out, I work all the time and I don’t want to stop, so there it is.’
We are sitting in the sumptuous splendour of a Beverly Hills hotel suite where, upon arrival (he was 30 minutes early), he immediately made his immaculately suited, razor-sharp presence felt.
He did not want – he said with a firm but gracious smile – any of the array of coffees set out on display. Neither did he want a cup of tea made from the gleaming silver pot of hot water and the dozen or so different leaf infusions. Hopkins wanted a kettle and a bag of English Breakfast tea.
As the room staff scurried off to deal with his request, the Oscar/Golden Globe/Bafta/ Emmy-winning actor launched into a short but spellbinding speech about the perfect cuppa in those Rada-modulated lyrical Welsh tones, lingering meaningfully over key words.
‘Hot water won’t do it. The water needs to be boiling,
boiling in order to get a proper brew.’ Never have the instructions for a cup of tea sounded more theatrical or portentous.
He pauses to take in the thinly disguised panic of the publicists clutching their mobiles to check on the progress of the kettle and leans conspiratorially forward with an amused smile. ‘And this is why they kicked us out,’ he says (referring to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, which led to the American Revolution). ‘All over a cup of tea.’
Hopkins – as his sharp little quip shows – is on fine form. There is none of the jaded ennui of actors half his age. He is looking trim and dapper in a slate-grey suit. His face is tanned and white hair neatly cropped. His aquamarine eyes have a definite twinkle as he settles down – tea finally in hand – to discuss the 92nd movie of his career and the fifth of the
Transformers blockbuster franchise, The Last Knight.
Hopkins, who was knighted in 1993, plays Sir Edmund Burton, who has devoted his life to the study of the ancestries of humans and Transformers. He and Mark Wahlberg (as the hero Cade Yeager) team up to make an unlikely alliance to save the world from being destroyed by war between the Transformers and humans.
‘You’re not going to ask me to explain the plot are you?’ he says. ‘Because it’s so very complicated. I have to admit, I don’t quite get all of it. All I know is I play an eccentric English lord. I had a terrific time making it. Mark Wahlberg was wonderful to work with, the locations were excellent [England, Norway, Arizona and the Isle of Skye] and I showed up, put my costume on, said my lines and stayed out of trouble. That’s all I ever do. It beats working for a living.’
Hopkins is always at pains to destroy any smug ‘luvviness’ about the acting world. He loathes the painful intensity of the method actors, who insist on staying in character throughout filming (‘what a pain in the ass’) and repeats several times that ‘the greatest difficulty in this business is the sense of entitlement some people have just because of what they do’.
Despite his authentically distinguished theatrical training (after Rada he was invited by Laurence Olivier to join London’s Royal National Theatre as his understudy), Hopkins actually revels in appearing in popcorn blockbusters. He recounts how once, as a 20-something stage actor appearing in a Jacobean play, his working-class father Richard asked him if there was ‘any shooting in it?’ After Hopkins’s
mother Annie remonstrated, his father responded: ‘It’s all very well hanging around here doing Shakespeare – you want to make money.’
‘And he was right,’ says Hopkins. ‘He told me to go to Hollywood and make some cash. That’s why I came to Los Angeles all those years ago [mid-Seventies].’
He became an actor, he says, ‘because I was not very good at school and I didn’t have it in me to be a baker like my father. I wanted to be a musician but I didn’t think I was good enough, so I became an actor by default. I was an angry, unsettled boy full of rage and that rage propelled me forward, forced me to look for something different I could do, so I stumbled upon the stage.’
There was also the fact that the most famous man from his neighbourhood in Wales was Richard Burton, who he once saw driving around in a sports car. ‘That made me think I could do something like that too,’ he recalls. ‘I just had to get moving and make myself a success at something. It was the anger in me that made me want to do something very different from everyone else and prove that I could make it in life.’
Hopkins is a complicated man and the bonhomie I am met with today has been hard won. As a young stage star he was as famous for his reckless drinking as he was for his standout performances. When he took over from Olivier in Strindberg’s
The Dance Of Death, the great actor noted him in his memoirs as having ‘exceptional promise. He walked away with the part of Edgar like a cat with a mouse between its teeth’. His Chekhov was marked by his ‘colossal energy and enraged convulsions’. But as much as Hopkins loved his hour upon the stage, he hated the elitism of the theatrical establishment, where he felt he never truly fitted in.
It was only the fact that critics viewed him as a brilliant firebrand of an actor that allowed him to get away with his heavy drinking but he ended up abandoning a production of
Macbeth in 1973 mid-run. He’d had enough of the theatre and was off to Hollywood.
These days Hopkins rarely talks about his boozing past or the two failed marriages (to actress Petronella Barker and production assistant Jennifer Lynton) and one daughter (Abigail, now 48, who he only sporadically sees) that fell in its wake.
He has been sober since December 29, 1975, the day he woke up in Arizona with no idea of how he had arrived in the desert city. On that day he attended his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. ‘It was all that mad energy,’ he says now. ‘I had an energy that ripped me apart and the booze was my way of dealing with that but when you have all that energy you can just keep going; you don’t know when to stop.’
At the moment he is reading a biography of the late comic genius John Belushi, who died after a drugs overdose. Hopkins sees his own self-destruction in Belushi. ‘He had that same rage and energy and he destroyed himself with it. I recognise myself in him. That restlessness and turbulence. I still have it but I’ve learnt to harness it. I’ve slowed myself down. I used to walk so fast and my wife [antiques dealer Stella Arroyave, whom he married in 2003] would say to me: “Stop walking like that, slow down,” and I have. I have mellowed, I have harnessed that energy. I paint, I compose music and that helps get it out of me in a good sort of way. I know it’s still within me but it doesn’t damage me any more.’ Like his tea, Hopkins has brewed from his days of boiling and crafted that
‘I was an angry, unsettled boy full of rage and that rage forced me to look for something I could do, so I started acting’