Silence of the art
rage into a controlled, distilled style of performance that reeks of undercurrent and nuance. The older he has grown, the more in demand he has become. His recent foray into the television box-set world, in Sky Atlantic’s critically acclaimed sci-fi thriller
Westworld has – like Transformers – brought him a whole new generation of fans. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘I guess if you stick around long enough people start to like you.’
I shake my head at this ridiculous level of self-deprecation and he apologises for being ‘a bit fraudulent’. ‘It’s a bad old habit,’ no regrets: Hopkins with second wife Jennifer Lynton in 1973; below, he says. ‘I stick the boot in before with Diana Rigg in Macbeth, 1972 anyone else does. And yes, I am and, below right, with one of his successful – I feel successful. I own paintings think I put myself down because I don’t want to get hurt. The reality is, I have arrived at a stage of life when I feel I have nothing to prove and that’s a very liberating thing.’
Adecade ago he was diagnosed with high-end Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological condition that affects social interaction. He is, he says himself, very much a loner. ‘I don’t go to parties, I don’t have many friends,’ he says. ‘But I do like people. I do like to get inside their heads.’
I ask him whether he thinks Asperger’s has helped him as an actor. He nods his head. ‘I definitely look at people differently. I like to deconstruct, to pull a character apart, to work out what makes them tick and my view will not be the same as everyone else. I get offered a lot of controlling parts, maybe because that’s how people see me.’
The role that changed his life – and turned him into a Hollywood A-lister – was his performance as the psychopathic killer Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 film Silence Of
The Lambs, opposite Jodie Foster. It came to him at a time when he was feeling washed-up as a film star. He had returned says. ‘We would occasionally have to London in the mid-Eighties lunch but most of the time I was then went to Broadway in 1989 to stuck in my glass booth.’ appear in the play M Butterfly. Ask him if it was his greatest role
Hopkins played Hannibal with and – somewhat surprisingly – he an electrifying restrained violence shakes his head. ‘No, no, definitely that won him an Oscar and not,’ he says. ‘I learned my lines, terrified even co-star Foster, who showed up and was herded into claimed they barely spoke during my glass box. It was a good role filming because she was so but for me my best performances scared of him. ‘That’s not true,’ he have been in The Remains Of The In the bad old days, Anthony Hopkins would drink a bottle of tequila or brandy in an attempt to still his raging energy – these days he has turned to art and road trips to keep him calm. ‘You need things in life that you can tune into – and tune out of yourself,’ he says. ‘In 2003, my wife found a couple of my drawings and said: “Why don’t you paint?” I told her I couldn’t, and she said: “Just paint, Tony.” ‘I wasn’t trained, I just painted by instinct. A friend of mine, who is an actual artist, saw my work and told me I had talent. The fact that I wasn’t trained didn’t matter, just to paint from my emotions.’ Hopkins’ paintings today sell for around €90,000 each. ‘I’ve now found something that relaxes me and that people put a value on. I have a studio at home and I’ll spend hours there, four days a week. It’s just me, my paint and my canvases.’
Day, Nixon and The World’s Fastest Indian, not Silence Of The Lambs.’ He pauses. ‘The best thing about that film was that it got me back out of the theatre. I’d done six months and the boredom had kicked in.’ He will not, he says, ever return to the stage, despite many offers over the decades. ‘Can’t do it,’ he says. ‘Same role every night, same words, same everything. I remember being asked if I wanted to do
Hamlet and I just said: “F*** off.”’ However, he is happy to film King
Lear for the BBC in September. ‘That to me is perfect. To do Lear on screen – that I can’t wait for.’
Hopkins is known for his phenomenal memory, able to repeat word perfect up to seven pages of script in one take. He reads each line up to 300 times to memorise Hopkins on film, from left: in The Silence Of The Lambs, 1991; in Thor: The Dark World, 2013; in The Remains Of The Day with Emma Thompson, 1993. Below left, (circled) at Cowbridge Grammar School, Wales, 1954 it and never uses a back-up script on set. Surely, at almost 80, his memory must be starting to fade? ‘No,’ he says firmly. ‘It’s still exactly the same but I work at it. If I’m not learning lines, I memorise difficult poems [he can recite most of Dylan Thomas’s works], just to keep it all going.’
With his advancing years he has the philosophy of a recovery survivor. He talks about friends like the actor John Hurt dying. Does he miss them? ‘I don’t,’ he says. ‘Death is part of life. We all end up there. You can’t miss people. They are gone. That is it, we have to accept it. When I went to Wales I went to see my mother’s grave and my father’s grave. It makes you think that we all end up as bones, so you have to make the most of the life you have.’
His life now could not be more different to his humble upbringing. He lives in a house in Malibu where his neighbour is Bob Dylan (‘I’ve never met him. He sent me a lovely hand-written note to say “hello” but we have never actually bumped into each other.’) His pleasures include driving through America, watching old Carry On films and spending time with the woman he describes as ‘the light of my life’, his wife Stella.
He has no regrets. ‘I have made many, many mistakes in my life,’ he says. ‘But do I regret any of them? No. I don’t regret the anger, I don’t regret the drinking. Life can be painful, it’s painful for everyone and that’s the deal. My motto is get over it, get over yourself, do the best you can do for as long as you can. And the best tea is made with boiling water.’
‘I had an energy that ripped me apart and the booze was my way of dealing with that’