“I’d gotten lazy”: the easy and unfulfilling payday that rejuvenated Anthony Hopkins
Plenty of veteran actors have settled into a routine of supporting parts, glorified cameos, and paycheque gigs once they enter their elder statesman phase, and for a while, Anthony Hopkins seemed quite content being one of them.
By the beginning of the 2010s, he was more prolific than he’d ever been, but the juiciest roles either didn’t interest him or weren’t coming his way. He had that Academy Award win for ‘Best Actor’ under his belt for The Silence of the Lambs and a further three nominations under his belt, but none since 1997.
He hadn’t been shortlisted for a competitive Bafta since 1994, he’d been overlooked by the Primetime Emmys since 1990, and his most recent successes at any major awards ceremony were honorary accolades from the Golden Globes and Baftas in 2005 and 2008. In industry parlance, when they start giving out lifetime achievement awards, then the best parts have all but dried up.
Since the turn of the millennium, Hopkins had played Hannibal Lecter twice more in sequels he ended up regretting, gone through the motions in blockbusters like Mission: Impossible II, Bad Company, Beowulf, Alexander, and The Wolfman, slummed it in dismal horror The Rite and failed prestige picture All the King’s Men, leading many to believe his best days were well and truly behind him.
There comes a time in any ageing thespian’s life when they need to accept the inevitable, and Hopkins had no issues doing just that. By his own admission, the Welshman was coasting through the remainder of his career relying on past glories, and he didn’t seem to mind.
Once he shook himself out of his self-inflicted stupor, he almost immediately turned the most unexpected of corners when Kenneth Branagh sought to gauge his interest in lending authoritative gravitas to the role of Norse deity Odin in Marvel Studios’ fourth feature Thor.
“I’d gone through a patch where I was getting very indifferent to everything, and I could care less about anything,” he confessed to Pop Entertainment. “Then to work with Ken, he just pushed the right buttons to get me to give of my best. I really value that in him, because I’d gotten lazy. He’s one of the best directors I’ve worked with, and so that was the principal reason.”
It wasn’t a remotely challenging or complex character to portray, something Hopkins openly acknowledged. “I wanted the work. Got to pay the rent you know? I thought this was a nice part,” he said. “Didn’t have to do too much. And then, no acting required. I wrote in my script, ‘NAR’, no acting required, let the armour act for me on the sets.”
Thor was a fantasy blockbuster, Hopkins was well-compensated for his efforts, he reminded himself in his own copy of the screenplay his dramatic muscles needed to be stretched. In the years to come he explained that even trying to act in the Marvel universe is “pointless” because that’s not why he was there or what was required of him. And yet, it coincided with the second wind that reinvigorated his career.
Hopkins had held his hands up and copped to becoming lazy in the years leading up to Thor, but in the period that followed, he was an actor reborn. Not that it was a complete rebuild from the ground up when he made plenty of awful movies and kept cashing those cheques on Michael Bay’s Transformers: The Last Knight and Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon, but he also set about delivering some of his best work in decades.
For the first time in over 20 years, Hopkins was an Oscars darling. He earned back-to-back nominations in supporting and lead categories for The Two Popes and The Father respectively, winning his second ‘Best Actor’ trophy for the latter and becoming the oldest-ever winner of a competitive acting prize.
The Baftas? He secured his first competitive nods in 24 years for those aforementioned films and won for the latter. The Primetime Emmys? A return to television in Westworld yielded his first nomination in 27 years. The Golden Globes? A pair of nominations for The Two Popes and The Father put him in the thick of a race he hadn’t been in for 23 years.
His 2023 double-header of playing Nicholas Winton in One Life and Sigmund Freud in Freud’s Last Session won him even more rapturous acclaim, underlining how Hopkins has continued doing some of the best work of his storied career into his late 80s. If it hadn’t been for Branagh and Thor dragging him out of his lazy phase and stirring those creative juices, then the ongoing Hopkins renaissance may have never happened at all.
