Series and More Anthony Hopkins: “It is liberating to know that deep down we are all insignificant”

Series and More Anthony Hopkins: “It is liberating to know that deep down we are all insignificant”

Series and More Anthony Hopkins: “It is liberating to know that deep down we are all insignificant”

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Thirty years ago, Anthony Hopkins terrified us all. He composed a character for the history of cinema, the Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs with which he managed to make us feel attracted by absolute evil, by someone who eats the livers of his victims accompanied by broad beans and a good chiantí. Hopkins is one of those actors who is even able to somehow change his body to suit each role. Something in his physiognomy mutates with each character. There is nothing of Lecter in his butler in The Remains of the Day, nor in his transformation into Ratzinger in The Two Popes.

At 83 years old, the British actor has done it again in El padre -which now extends his presence in theaters where he has been staying since December-, where he offers one of the most devastating performances in recent years. A character named after him and with whom he shares a date of birth in a game of reality and fiction. His Anthony is an Alzheimer's patient who sees his life change. We see it through his eyes, and it all becomes something like a thriller. Faces change, bodies change, and we can only feel strange at what we cannot understand.

His body changes every frame. We see in his eyes the passage from lucidity to darkness in a second, and one understands that he is one of the favorites for the Oscar for a role that could fall into excess and that he controls with a master's hand in the Florian Zeller film that nominated for six Academy Awards. An award that he only has, precisely, for The Silence of the Lambs. It is surprising that with such fine, precise and complex work, the actor says that “it was easy”, but that is how he described it in a meeting with a handful of journalists where EL ESPAÑOL was present.

Anthony Hopkins in the movie.

Series y Más Anthony Hopkins: “Es liberador saber que en el fondo todos somos insignificantes”

“My work was easy, the script was so good, it was so well written, and we had an excellent director and a wonderful cast… Don't think about it anymore, the only thing that is evident is in the pages of the script, in those lines, my work was just following those words, the directions on the map, I didn't think too much about it, ”he explains with his partner, Olivia Colman, who plays his daughter and who is also up for an Oscar for a role he chose for a reason: to work with Hopkins.

Hopkins built the character of him as someone who had always been in control and is losing it for the first time, and confesses that he was very much reminded of his own father. “I remember when he was dying, he became irritable. He had a very bad mood, and especially with me and my mother. He didn't even want us to touch him. 'Leave me alone, leave me alone,' he said. It was very painful, but I finally understood what I was going through,” he explains.

For him it was a lesson about the inevitability of death. “In the movie, when Olivia leaves me in the hospital, forever, I realized that none of us are completely free, because there is no escape, life ends and it is our destiny. When my father was dying I looked at him in bed and thought: it's going to happen to me too. You're going to die, you're not special. None is. For me, this film, I don't like to say that it has changed my life, but somehow it has had an impact. Understanding that none of us are free has given me a feeling of freedom, because I told myself, you have to enjoy. We don't know what will happen next. We have no idea if we're going to get hit by a car or have a heart attack, and somehow that wonderful feeling of knowing you're insignificant is liberating."

For Anthony Hopkins, this film also has a new reading with everything that has happened to us. He himself has been very active in networks during confinement, but he recognizes that he has been very harsh, and that in some way it is assimilated to the dementia that his character suffers. “Everyone has experienced isolation in this confinement, and I think it may have a parallel with dementia, with this man locked up in his environment, in his apartment, where he only hears the traffic but does not even know where. is. We've been home for a year, and the isolation drives you crazy. There are many cases of depression, and even suicide, and it is a tragedy. Especially for the youngest, who cannot go anywhere, not even to school. It's painful, ”he ditches.

If Hopkins were to win that well-deserved Oscar, he would become the oldest actor to win the award as a leading actor. He would, also just 30 years after that Dr. Lecter. With a radically different role, but with an irrefutable sign that he is one of the best actors in the history of recent cinema.

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