He is an acclaimed, Academy Award-winning performer – and his Hannibal Lecter is considered one of the all-time great movie villains. Yet as he reflects on playing a fading stage star in a new TV-movie adaptation of The Dresser, Anthony Hopkins says: "I wasn't cut out to be an actor".
“I wanted to be a musician but I drifted into this business by mistake,” he adds. “I’m still looking over my shoulder thinking somebody will say, ‘Sorry, Tony, you’re in the wrong business’.”
He may have doubts about his suitability as an actor, but few others do. He won a best-actor Oscar in 1991 for his role as cannibalistic serial killer Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, and gained further nominations for The Remains of the Day (1993), Nixon (1995) and slavery drama Amistad (1997).
In The Dresser, the 78-year-old Welsh actor plays Sir, a cranky old thespian mounting a production of King Lear and battling the infirmities of age. Ian McKellen co-stars as Norman, his devoted dresser, in a juicy display by two British acting aristocrats (both have been knighted).
Adapted from Ronald Harwood's 1980 play of the same name – previously adapted for the big screen in 1983, starring Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay – The Dresser is a bittersweet ode to the theatre.
Hopkins has few fond memories of his own early stage experiences, in Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company.
"I found it absolute purgatory," he says. "All those endless tours as a walk-on, running on in wrinkled tights to Olivier's Othello ... I just couldn't take the routine of it. I just thought, God, what a depressing life."
Hopkins walked out of a 1973 stage production of Macbeth in mid-run, and has not performed on stage in almost 30 years. One of his last stage roles was a 1986 National Theatre production of King Lear. He says he was "too young, too confused and too unsettled" to play Shakespeare's fallen king.
Producer Colin Callender said The Dresser started out as an attempt to lure Hopkins back to the theatre: "As I sat down he said, 'I'm never going to do this on stage. But I will do it for television'."
Hopkins says filming The Dresser was "the best time" he has had as an actor.
“The play is so well-written, and Ronald Harwood addresses the very make-up of the actor,” he says. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I know this guy.’ I knew exactly how to play the man – because I’ve been that. I am that.”
Hopkins gets to perform chunks of King Lear in The Dresser – and the experience has emboldened him to tackle the play again, in a TV version made by Callender's company for the BBC.
It has also made him rethink his aversion to the stage.
“Ian’s trying to get me to go back to the stage – but I don’t think I’ve got the courage to do it,” he says.
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure. It’s something I just let waft around in my head. Maybe one day.”
• The Dresser debuts on Tuesday, May 31, on Starz Play Arabia
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