Considered to be an ace in the deck of talented actors, Anthony Hopkins is well known for his portrayal of Hannibal lecter in The Silence of the lambs, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, its sequel Hannibal, and the prequel Red Dragon. Other notable films include Thor, TheMask of Zorro, The Bounty, Meet Joe Black, The Elephant Man, Magic, 84 Charing Cross Road, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, legends of the Fall,The Remains of the Day, Amistad,Nixon, The World’s Fastest Indian, Instinct, and Fracture. Hopkins, who will next seen in Jonathan Nolan’s upcoming show, Westworld as Dr. Robert Ford, has both a fascination with the creatures he has brought to life and a casual disregard for them. The show premieres in India on Tuesday, October 4th on Star World Premiere HD.
Are you based in the US permanently nowIJ
Anthony H: Yes I live in Malibu. I’ve been in America for 40 odd years now. The time has gone by so fast I can’t believe it - I came out here in 1973. That was when I was in New York and then came out here 1975. I just drifted into a way of life here. I love it. I like Americans too. They are terrific - very generous people. But they are a bit crazy. There’s that mentality of: ‘I want to get things done now,’ you knowIJ
There’s a wonderful joke, I saw, a cartoon in the New Yorker, one of these wonderful cartoons. There’s this American - you can see he’s American cause he’s got Pan-Am on his suitcase - and he’s sitting in an Ashram up in Tibet, with this little skeletal guru. And he’s like this: Yeah, okay, so what happens nextIJAnd the guru tells him: it takes many many lives to learn. And he’s like, but I’ll try and do it in 20 minutes.
Do you go back to the UK muchIJ
Anthony H: I do go back to England, and I love visiting. I was back there recently doing a film, The Dresser, with Ian McKellen. I had such a good time on that.
What can you tell us about your character DrFordIJ
Anthony H: I get to play these very strange characters who are always in control, which is completely against my nature. I just go with the flow of it all now, and I love being out here. I can’t take anything too seriously.
With Dr Ford it is on a massive scale - he controls everything and he wants to perfect everything. Which means he’s mad. All I do is talk a lot - a lot of very highfalutin stuff about the bicameral mind.
What do you think it is about you that means you are cast in these very controlled rolesIJ
Anthony H: I have no idea. Maybe it’s coldness. I think maybe it’s the blank stare. But I don’t relish that - I’ve never been interested in control. I think most of our pain comes from trying to control everything. Or dominate - dominate other people and dominate ourselves, terrorising ourselves. I started giving that up some time ago. I just said, oh, I don’t know.
The best piece of wisdom I can come up with is: I know nothing. I don’t know. I can have opinions, but I really don’t know.
What attracted you to the projectIJ
Anthony H: Well, my agent phoned one day and said would you like to be in WestworldIJ I said, what, the old movieIJ She said, it’s HBO - and I hadn’t done television in years.
They sent me the script and I said: ‘Play Doctor FordIJ It’s very complicated.’ But I said I’d do it -and that was back in 2014.
When people ask me, you know, at these interviews, why did you become an actor, I say, well, it beats working, doesn’t itIJ
And they say, whatIJ Well, it beats working for a living. They say, why did you take this partIJ Well, nobody else will do it. It baffles them because they wanted me to give a controlled answer: Well, I did it because of the arc of the part and the narrative.
But I said, I have no idea. And it’s not a pose - I mean it. It’s a very peculiar business, being an actor.
What aspects of getting into Ford’s character did you enjoy the mostIJ
Anthony H: I had a good time with it, I was very relaxed during it. I had to learn a lot of dialogue, a lot of text, but I enjoy that. It keeps my brain cells active. I don’t want to overdo it, but I love learning long text - I just love it.
I understand you were only given the scripts as you were due to film them, rather than given the entire story upfront. How did you find that, especially as in film you always know the ending when you are shootingIJ
Anthony H: I asked Jonathan (Nolan) who produced it, and the directors, what happens in this goddam thingIJ And he said he wasn’t going to tell me. I had no idea what was happening - he didn’t tell me about the arc at all. I didn’t know much about the other characters, either, and what was happening to them, until it was revealed, and there were some big surprises. And then I thought, well, this is really interesting - I enjoyed not knowing.
You’ve got a very impressive cast indeed…
Anthony H: Oh yes, there are wonderful actors that I get to work with. Most of my work was with Jeffrey Wright, who is terrific.
What do you think your wealth of experience brought to the productionIJ
Anthony H: I have a good imagination, and as I’m working on a part, I see how things could work, geographically. If I say, can I try this, a really good director will say, okay, let’s have a look at it. But if they don’t have a clue about what they’re doing, and you show up on set and it’s all chaos, then you have to take a bit of chance, and say, well, I’d like to do it this way - without making anyone offended.
I remember doing a scene on Westworld, with a very good director, Michelle Maclaren. I’d seen it in my own cinematic vision in my head, and I said, I’d like to do it this way. Then Jonah came on the set, and said, oh my god, I didn’t think the scene was going to work like that. But you’ve got to try it, experiment with it. The more you try to control yourself, you get frightened, and you’re afraid to move. You have to throw off ideas of what people think.
How do you feel about the rapid advancement of technology - are ‘thinking robots’ part of our inevitable futureIJ
Anthony H: This is Jonathan Nolan’s baby - he’s fascinated by the advent and development of human intelligence and artificial intelligence. I was talking to a guy the other day from Boston. I was up in Ojai. I went there for a holiday, and there was a guy there, in the hotel, he was having breakfast and lunch. We got chatting. And he’s from MIT.
He was saying, there’s no such thing - you can never really create artificial intelligence. You cannot create life, you cannot create a thinking being. But then he said: ‘But I could be wrong.’
Are you reasonably tech-savvy in your everyday lifeIJ
Anthony H: Yes, I have a computer, and an iPad and an iPhone, and I know how to use them. I write out all the texts I’m learning onto a computer and put color codes on it.
It just makes it look important, instead of a white blank page.