New Again: Anthony Hopkins

HOPKINS: California has done a tremendous amount for me. I love living here…

LIEBMAN: So what happened in ’84? What prompted you to move back?

HOPKINS: I never thought I’d work here again. There’s a divide. English actors tend to come and go, you know. America’s been very good to English actors, but it’s not the same. I had been doing The Bounty, and I enjoyed it in some ways. I enjoyed working with Mel Gibson- he was nice- and especially Dan Day-Lewis. The role of the Bligh in The Bounty is actually one of my favorite parts. But it was done in Tahiti, and it was rough working on the ships. People were very sick. Not me so much, but if you work on boats all day, there’s a strong chance of sunstroke. And all the waters were dirty. There were so many takes, you didn’t know what was happening. Then I returned, and at the time I didn’t get, you know, the sort of Robert De Niro offers. I wanted to do something, and I thought maybe I should go back and exercise my brain. So I went back to the theater and I did some American films in Europe, and I did The Tenth Man for CBS. But I’d really thought I’d vanished off the American scene. So it was a surprise when Jonathan Demme asked me to do Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.

LIEBMAN: What made him want you for the part?

HOPKINS: I think it was The Elephant Man that did it. I had also done M. Butterfly, in London, which I think he came to see.

LIEBMAN:Did you have a concept for Lecter or did you find the character as you went along?

HOPKINS: Yes, I had a concept. I conceived of Lecter as a clicking machine. A killing machine. So much was shot in extreme close-up to get the sense that Lecter was living in another world that I had to play a lot of scenes straight into the camera, which was often just a couple of inches away from my face, or sometimes ot the script girl right behind it, which was fine but a little frustrating. As a director Demme talks to you a lot. He looks at you very earnestly and describes what he wants. Then he goes and looks through the viewfinder or the TV monitor, and starts saying encouraging things: [Hopkins vogues for a second, like a fashion photographer] “Yeah, yeah…that’s great.” That sort of thing.

LIEBMAN: What about Lecter’s soft spot for the Jodie Foster character, Clarice?

HOPKINS: He’s still human. I played Hitler once, and at one point I was approached by on of the film’s producers, who actually said to me, “That’s nice, but could you just play him less human?” Well, Hitler is human- that’s what’s frightening. Clarice taps into Lecter’s sense of humor. He finds it amusing that this little nothing of a girl….It’s a fairy story, you see, in which the heroine goes into the cave of the Wicked Dragon. I conceived of it as a fairy tale, as a spiritual archetype of good and evil. She shines the light into the darkness and it helps her see her own demons. He arms her to trap the real dragon. I have great hopes, by the way, that Hannibal Lecter will return.