Sir Anthony Hopkins had his breakthrough film role in 1968, as Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn’s power-hungry son in “The Lion in Winter.” Half a century and many roles later—among them Richard Nixon, Alfred Hitchcock, Pope Benedict XVI, King Lear (twice), John Quincy Adams, Pablo Picasso, and, of course, Hannibal Lecter—Hopkins is eighty-three and deep into his own lion-in-winter years. But he isn’t roaring. On Instagram, he treats his two and a half million followers to tossed-off bits of Chopin from his home in the Pacific Palisades, where he has been quarantining for the past year. He paints, reads, plays with his cat. Life seems mellow.
Onscreen, though, Hopkins can still whip up a tempest. In “The Father,” a new film directed by Florian Zeller, based on Zeller’s prize-winning French play, he stars as an old man in the throes of dementia, wrenched between belligerence and confusion as his daughter (Olivia Colman) struggles to care for and contain him. It’s one of Hopkins’s finest performances, by turns wrathful and befuddled, helpless and defiant. Zeller’s screenplay, adapted with Christopher Hampton, is a kind of labyrinth that plunges the viewer inside the father’s scrambled consciousness: characters suddenly vanish or change faces, settings shift, and we feel the disorientation along with him. As always, Hopkins is a master of onscreen cogitation; you can see his character turning over thoughts, or resisting the thoughts that come unbidden. He’s now at the forefront of the Academy’s Best Actor race, a year after he was nominated for “The Two Popes” and three decades after his Oscar-winning role in “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Over Zoom last week, Hopkins appeared in front of a crowded bookshelf and asked that I call him Tony. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
How have you been spending the past year? Have you been able to work?
No. Well, I did one Zoom film. It’s very odd. It’s about a time machine, I think. But it was entertaining, and I had a lot of lines to learn. It keeps my brain fresh. I haven’t worked since “The Father,” and, in fact, I’ve been in lockdown for a whole year. But I did get the vaccination last week, and I’ve got another one coming. So I play the piano and I paint and I read a lot.
I understand that’s something you’ve done since childhood, play piano and compose?
Yes, I started as a kid. I was five. My mother made me go for music lessons, and I took to it. I attempt to do very difficult pieces by Rachmaninoff and Chopin and Scriabin. I have no ambitions to play at Carnegie Hall or anything like that, but I do it for my own pleasure. I have a Bösendorfer piano, and I hide away down in my basement so that I don’t disturb people. And I paint. My wife got me to paint some years ago, because she found some old drawings of mine. So now I sell my paintings, and there’s quite a market for them.
I’ll tell you something interesting, a discovery for me. Some years ago, Stan Winston, who had created all the monsters for “Jurassic Park,” came for a barbecue or something, and he went into the studio and he saw my paintings. He said, “Who did these?” I pulled a face and said, “I did.” He said, “Why are you pulling a face like that?” I said, “I have no training.” He said, “Don’t train. You’ve got it. Just paint.” I’ve found that’s a good philosophy in life. Don’t think too much about it. Just do it.
Your Instagram feed is so lighthearted and full of joy. How did that start? Did someone have to cajole you into it?
It started with Mark Wahlberg. I was working in Oxford on the Michael Bay film [“Transformers: The Last Knight”], and he said, “I want you to go on Twitter to tweet.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. I’m a bit dopey about that. So I did a message, and that’s how it started. My wife has encouraged me to do it, especially in these dire times. I mean, millions upon millions of people cannot move out of their environment. So I try to send cheerful messages. As screwed up as we are as human beings, we can find a way out of this. I do live with optimism.
In “The Father,” you play a man with advanced dementia. How did you understand what that would feel like and look like?
I’ve never experienced dementia in my own family. My father died of heart disease. My mother died of old age, actually, at eighty-nine. I’d only witnessed one moment of dementia, in a friend’s father-in-law. The family around him had to cope, had to be patient. They would try to answer his questions. They wouldn’t try to contradict him. He thought the Pacific Ocean was the Hudson River, and he thought his daughter was his wife. And I watched them saying, “It’s O.K., Pop.” They’d feed him television suppers, and he died very peacefully.
But, to get to a simpler answer: if you follow a superb screenplay, the language is a road map, and so you don’t have to act. I remember the first day with Olivia Colman, our first scene together, she comes into the room and says, “What’s going on? What happened?”—about the woman I fired. I say, “What do you mean, ‘What happened’?” So those lines, obviously they mean irritation or irascibility. And then you work with someone like Olivia, and it makes it so easy. Acting’s not required. And I think, because I’m eighty-three, I’m closer to that age, that dangerous age when it could happen. I hope to God it doesn’t. That’s why I play the piano and paint and learn poetry.
The script is so clever about thrusting the audience into these moments when the father doesn’t know where he is or who he’s talking to. There’s a devastating scene toward the beginning when the daughter, who was played by Olivia Colman in the first scene, suddenly reënters the apartment and is played by a different actress, Olivia Williams, and you see the certainty drain from the father’s face. Was there anything you had to do as an actor to establish some sense of what his reality was?
No. It appears in the moment when it happens. I go to the door, and another woman walks in. [Blanches with disbelief.] That’s all you need to do. The only thing I designed within my own head was: get over it fast. “Ah, you’ve got chicken?” Disguise it somehow, and smile.
Yes, in a way what he’s doing the entire movie is coping with his denial that he actually has this problem. There’s a scene at the end where he breaks down and regresses into childhood, calling for his mommy. It’s so upsetting and heartbreaking. You said that this was an easy movie to do, but that seems hard.
Let me put it this way: I’ve been doing it a long time now. And, as the years have gone by, I’ve found it easier to act. When you’re younger, you want to become “it.” We used to have a forum out here for young actors, and all I could say to them was, “Just keep it as simple as you can. But if you have to do Stanislavski on it, if you have to do Lee Strasberg, fine. There’s nothing wrong with that.” I was trained in that way myself, in Method. As the years have gone by, I’ve incorporated into my skill set a fast means of doing it. That is, to keep it simple, keep it relaxed, and know the text. Once you learn the text, it’s like getting into a car after years of experience. It’s automatic.
I was given advice about that by two brilliant men, John Dexter, the great director, and Laurence Olivier. So there’s name-dropping for you. Olivier said, “Just keep it simple.” I was directed by Olivier twice. And, as I said, with Christopher Hampton, who adapted Florian’s play for the screenplay, it is a road map. Florian told me when we met, “The [character’s] name is Anthony.” He said he wrote it for me. And he put my actual birth date in. There’s a scene in the office with the doctor, where she says, “Date of birth?” I say, “Friday, the thirty-first of December, 1937.” As a little bit of character, I said, “Can I add ‘Friday’? Because I know the date.” I wanted to show the doctor, “I’m in perfect control. There’s nothing wrong with me. Friday. You got a problem with that?” That is a man who is in control—but, of course, he’s not. He’s been used to control all his life. He was an engineer, an exacting profession, with two daughters. His favorite has sadly been killed in a car crash, we assume. And he’s a bit of a tyrant. He’s not a bad man, he’s just been a tough old father, impatient and irascible, and now finally he’s losing control of it all. In the last scene, he says, “I’m losing all my leaves. Everything’s falling away.” And that must be a devastating tragedy.
