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“I know how to scare people.”
The voice on the phone belongs to a “tough old goat,” who turns out to actually be self-effacing and charming, someone who appreciates vulnerability, and writes and talks about being openhearted and about manifesting one’s own future. He’s the kind of person who says every day is “the youngest you’ll ever be.” Still when Anthony Hopkins talks about scaring people, you know he knows what he’s talking about.
We’re chatting about his new memoir, “We Did OK, Kid,” and he’s recounting his first meeting with Jonathan Demme, when Hopkins explained why he should play Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.” As he does in the book, the legendary actor dissects how he approached the role, adding a digression about Joseph Stalin being scariest when he went quiet. Hopkins told Demme, “the quietness is the most terrifying part — it goes back to childhood, going to a room, turning on a light, there’s a big spider on the wall, quiet, waiting.”
Hopkins, who turns 88 on New Year’s Eve, then briefly slides into the voice that freaked out so many people, needing just a couple of phrases to demonstrate his point, saying “good morning” — the way he first greeted Clarice Starling — and then sneering the line about Clarice escaping her life “all the way to the F … B … I.”
It’s a thrill, of course, but really it’s the rest of the conversation that’s revelatory, especially the intellect that belies his modesty (in our conversation he references Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Edgar Allen Poe and Jean-Paul Sartre) as well as his candor, warmth and attitude toward the life he has lived.
Hopkins stayed on the phone way past my allotted time, and while I’d been told in advance not to ask about the Palisades fire that destroyed his home and belongings, he brought it up himself several times where it was relevant, including when I asked why Kenneth Branagh narrated the audiobook — while Hopkins was grateful at how relatively fortunate he was and acted “stoic” after losing his home, he still felt overwhelmed. “It felt like such a task then,” he says. But the book includes an appendix of poems he cherishes by the likes of W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, and Hopkins will read some of those for the audio release.
Rising from a working-class life in a small town in Wales to international fame wasn’t easy, but Hopkins says he became the author of his own success through luck and sheer determination, willing his career into existence, in part by speaking his dreams aloud. “There’s some strange magnetic force that’s in us — you can talk about God or whatever you want to call it — but I think it’s a metaphysical process that’s in us.”
The book is filled with stories about working with and learning from the likes of Laurence Olivier and Peter O’Toole, who gave him his first break in “The Lion in Winter.” With such a long and illustrious career, Hopkins has no false modesty — when I ask what role was hardest to access, he says, “Well, I’m going to sound very conceited now. I didn’t find anything difficult to play” — but he undersells the thoughtful rigor in his approach.
In the book he emphasizes that the readiness is all, learning his lines backward and forward before the first rehearsal. “As I’m learning the words I’m building an image of the person in my mind and my voice begins to change,” he told me. “It gives you the freedom to relax and have some fun with your lines.” (He adds playfully that he also “gets a great kick out of shocking everyone” by having an entire script memorized on day one.)
While he abhors actors who think “mumbling is interesting,” he doesn’t overwhelm younger actors who ask for advice with too much detail. “Show up and be bold,” he tells them.
Beyond that, Hopkins prefers to avoid “an introspective analysis.” At one point he says, “If somebody came from outer space and asked what does being an actor mean, I’d just say, ‘I become other people.’ How have I done it? I have no idea. I found it easy.”
Yet the next day he called again to ask if he could text me further thoughts, which was a detailed interpretation of his King Lear in the acclaimed 2018 TV film. “I wanted to remove the lyric-poetic and theatrical version of the old man to a brutalist version of human existence,” he began, later drawing comparisons to Hamlet and breaking down Lear’s “O, you are men of stones” quote. Subsequent texts ventured into the idea of playing Iago in “Othello” now, as an old man who has been passive until “suddenly, the monster awakens,” like a “bland and harmless” veteran he knew years ago who snapped.
Clearly, he does more than just “become other people.”
First, of course, he had to become himself. Hopkins writes about being a poor student. He was bullied or belittled by other children, teachers (who were often quick to hit back then) and even family. “I wasn’t very bright in school,” he says. Being considered dumb lodged itself in his psyche while his “instinct for self-survival” taught him to “blank them out and take all the punishment and never respond, which drove them nuts.”
The book presents a sympathetic portrait of his parents even though he’s frank about his parents not knowing how to fully love or guide their dreamy child and about his father’s alcoholism and depression.
He says while his “dumb insolence” approach protected him and the “energy of anger” he stored up drove him to prove himself and may have helped him understand how to scare people on screen, it also was a dangerous approach to living, leaving him feeling in limbo, disconnected from his own life.
“It gave rise to a paranoia because I thought the only way to avoid getting hurt is to avoid it all,” he says. “I kept playing the game of the dopey little boy, protecting myself with my own stupidity. But I did grow sick and tired of it and eventually had to say to myself, ‘Stop playing this game.’”
He couldn’t fully connect or stop playing the game until he confronted his alcoholism (and depression) and stopped drinking, a struggle he writes about frankly in the book.
“I was a lone drinker and could seal myself up from people,” he says now, adding that he’s lucky he didn’t end up in jail at certain points for driving blackout drunk. He avoids being preachy in the book. He tells me, “I loved to booze, it was just that I knew it was going to kill me.”
After finally getting help, he freed himself of “the compulsion to destroy myself. But I still had the demons, the anger, the feeling on edge and never feeling secure.”
He tries not to wallow in regret but does feel remorse about the people he hurt with his “cruel” behavior during his drinking years. “Looking back at that is sickening,” he says, adding that he has apologized where he could.
He credits his wife, Stella Arroyave, whom he married in 2003, with completing his transformation and persuading him to accept his own limitations. “She said, ‘Stop taking it all so seriously — it’s vanity and narcissism because nobody’s that interested in what you’re doing or thinking,’” he recalls. “And she’s right.”
Surrounded by his wife and nieces, he says he has learned from their willing vulnerability. Now he views the world and the people around him with “much more compassion and understanding. I have no more time for rancor and bitterness — they’re like a cancer.”
Hopkins is acutely aware of his own mortality but feels lucky to be alive and at peace with his life as he lived it. He also keeps plowing ahead, with three film projects coming in the next four months. “Onward,” he says. “I find great glee in showing up on set and having a go at it. Let’s make it a better world now. Be happy and have a bit of fun. Because we’re going to be dead for a long time.”
The post Anthony Hopkins can scare you, then disarm you with his modesty appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
