From his home tucked between the Santa Monica mountains and the Pacific Ocean, Sir Anthony Hopkins likes to open Google Maps and tour the streets of Margam, the steel town in South Wales where he was born on New Year's Eve 83 years ago. "I start at my grandfather's house, walk up Caernarfon Road and then travel all over Port Talbot. It's just a game."
As a child, he loved hanging from the pole at the back of the bus that took him to Port Talbot, impatient as he was for something to happen again. And he is still impatient, both with life - "Just get on with it. We're all going to die"-as well as with himself. "I have suffered some minor injuries from sometimes going too fast, doing too much," he says. "My wife tells me to slow down and I listen."
When he arrived in America four decades ago, he was a restless young man with an inferiority complex, who felt he did not belong anywhere. Now he is one of the most respected and celebrated actors in Hollywood and recently received his second Oscar for Best Actor, for his latest film, The Father.
That film follows a father's deterioration into dementia while his daughter, played with a stoic demeanour by Olivia Colman, broods and worries about him. Christopher Hampton's script is based on the award-winning play by French writer Florian Zeller, who makes his directorial debut with it. From the outset, The Father puts its audience on the wrong track by subtly undermining everything we think we know.
In the stifling confines of an elegant flat, a single afternoon stretches into an endless cycle of bewilderment. No matter how hard Anthony (Zeller has given Hopkins' character not only his name but, remarkably, his date of birth) tries to cling to what is real, the ground under his feet keeps constantly shifting. And so it is for the viewer too. Just when you feel you've been given a reliable clue, that timeline disappears again, forcing you to empathise with Anthony's disorientation and confusion as he limps from furious resistance to fragility.
The result makes your brain wrack at the seams trying to piece together all the elements of the story - exactly as Zeller intended. The playwright was raised by his grandmother, who started showing signs of dementia when he was 15. The idea was never just to tell a story about the condition; it was mainly to let the audience experience it actively, from the inside.
There is no redeeming note here, and very little sentimentality. Dementia makes Anthony uninhibited: one moment he is charming and erudite, the next excruciatingly cruel. It is not only a film about the limits of love, when the parent-child relationship is upended, but also about the horrifying truth that suffering and tolerance are not endless.
Hopkins is mesmerising in the role -you don't doubt for a moment that all his feelings are real- but he says it was a pretty easy role for him to play. "It wasn't difficult to act old, because I am old," he says. "There's a trick to it, you know. When you arrive on set, you have to have complete confidence in yourself. In my little kingdom, I have to be king." He admits that he leaves most roles behind when filming is over, but this role has stayed with him. "It made me more aware of mortality and the fragility of life. And it has made me judge people less. We are all vulnerable, we are all broken. We can point fingers and judge other people. That's so easy, because the world is a madhouse. But I try to keep my mouth shut and enjoy life the best I can."
Read Caroline Scott's full interview in Gentlemen's Watch # 77.
Anthony Hopkins' best (according to IMDB rating)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The Father (2020)
The Elephant Man (1980)
QB VII (1974)
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
The Remains of the Day (1993)
The World's Fastest Indian (2005)
Peter and Paul (1981)
Chaplin (1992)
Legends of the Fall (1994)
The Two Popes (2019)
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