Welsh acting stalwart Anthony Hopkins delighted a packed crowd at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea International Film Festival (RSIFF), delivering a range of impressions as well as memories from his career during his In Conversation session.
The 87-year-old Hopkins outstripped several much younger In Conversation guests by speaking for over an hour and taking a range of questions from an enraptured local audience.
With occasional prompts from host Ryan Ashore, director of the Red Sea Labs, Hopkins related stories from his 60-year screen career, including one of his most iconic roles: Dr Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence Of The Lambs.
“My agent sent me a script, he said I want you to read The Silence Of The Lambs,” said Hopkins. “I thought it was a children’s fairytale.”
The actor said he knew 10 pages into the script that “this is the best part I’ve ever read”, but also that “I know how to play him.”
“I want to play him as a machine,” said Hopkins. “He’s an intellectual genius, trapped in a psychotic form where he has no feeling for humanity. He’s a psychotic – he has no feeling, he’ll kill.”
The actor then performed several lines from the film, including the famous “fava beans and a nice Chianti” speech.
Hopkins had words of advice for young actors today, which he related through tips he received from Katharine Hepburn, whom Hopkins imitated. “Hepburn said to me, ‘You don’t have to act, just be what you are. You’ve got good hair and good shoulders – just speak the lines.’
“I don’t mean mumble – young actors tend to mumble, I don’t know if they’re trying to do Marlon Brando,” continued Hopkins, before launching into a Brando impression.
“But Brando was the greatest technician of all, he understood everything.”
The Welsh actor added that he has worked with several young actors who have mumbled as a performance choice. “I said, ‘You’ll have no career left, because of your mumbling,’” said Hopkins. “Your part in this film is to tell a story. Your job is to speak the line – the audience has paid you. Otherwise, you may as well go to the pub next door.”
Hopkins spoke briefly about a couple of upcoming roles, including in Guy Ritchie’s thriller Wife And Dog. “He’s the most interesting director I’ve ever worked with,” said Hopkins, describing the UK filmmaker as “a strange genius”.
Further impressions included Hopkins’ Nixon director Oliver Stone and Laurence Olivier.
Beyond expectations
The actor spoke to a near-packed house in the 868-seat Auditorium venue at the Cultural Square, and kept returning to a simple message – that he had no sense of a determining force in his life.
“My life is really beyond my expectations,” said Hopkins. “I believe someone else has written my life, because I feel the most fortunate and grateful to be here.
“Getting old now, but I’m still there. I mean in all humility – I’m still here, and I don’t know why. That’s the extraordinary puzzle of life.”
Hopkins is one of only 11 men to have won at least two best actor Oscars, and is the actor with the longest gap between his awards, for The Silence Of The Lambs in 1992 and The Father in 2021.
He has been nominated on four other occasions: best actor for The Remains Of The Day and Nixon, and best supporting actor for Amistad and The Two Popes.
Hopkins’s upcoming roles include Morten Tyldum’s Ibelin and Bobby Moresco’s racing drama Maserati: The Brothers.
RSIFF runs until Saturday, December 13.
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