The movie that rescued Anthony Hopkins from a downward spiral: “The boredom had kicked in”

Posted On March 1, 2025March 1, 2025

Anthony Hopkins has moved from stage to screen and back again for nearly seven decades. The Welsh actor got his start on the stage where he quickly caught the eye of Sir Laurence Olivier. With the older actor’s mentorship, Hopkins rose through the ranks to become a highly respected Shakespearean performer. His film debut wasn’t too shabby either, playing Richard the Lionheart in the 1968 period drama The Lion in Winter opposite Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn. 

You’d think this first decade or two as an actor would be pretty hard to top, but Hopkins did. When he began working in Hollywood in the ‘70s, his career reached new heights. He’s earned six Oscar nominations over the years and won two, including for The Father in 2021 when he was 83, which made him the oldest person to win an Academy Award in a major category.

However, at some point in the late ‘80s, Hopkins felt that his career was stagnating. He was appearing in several movies a year as a character actor, but he was also spending a lot of time in theatre. When the script for The Silence of the Lambs landed on his desk, he didn’t see it as an opportunity to win an Oscar (though he did get one for it); he saw it as his escape from the stage.

“The best thing about that film was that it got me back out of the theatre,” he told the Daily Mail in 2017. “I’d done six months, and the boredom had kicked in.” Unlike many actors who see the stage as a form of liberation from the film industry, Hopkins found live performances to be utterly dull and uninspiring. “Same role every night, same words, same everything,” he said. “I remember being asked if I wanted to do Hamlet, and I just said, ‘Fuck off.’”

Most actors would kill to play Hamlet, especially for a large audience, but Hopkins had had enough of Shakespeare and the stage in general. The Silence of the Lambs gave him the opportunity to play a major character (albeit a cannibalistic serial killer) in an Oscar-winning box office hit. It turned him into a bankable movie star and has led to a pretty cushy career of supporting roles in big-budget studio fare.

Interestingly enough, Hopkins doesn’t consider The Silence of the Lambs to be his best film, or even one of his best films, even though it is the one he is most known for. That distinction belongs to 2005’s The World’s Fastest Indian, 1995’s Nixon, and 1993’s The Remains of the Day. The latter two earned him Oscar nominations, while the first one is simply a personal favourite.

Still, when it comes to iconic performances, he probably could never outdo his chilling turn as Hannibal Lecter. He might be prouder of his work in the three films he mentioned, but that role in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 classic will always be the one that he is most associated with. It might not be his most endearing performance, but it certainly is the most memorable.

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