His voice is soothing, his halting delivery prone to the odd acceleration whenever the memories begin to flow. Unmistakable is that mix of raging sadness and defiant determination familiar from more than 50 years of performances, but most notably from his towering turn in The Remains of the Day as the repulsed wartime butler too conscientious and deluded to declare fascist sympathies of his employer. Hopkins is a warmer presence, less troubled overall, though waves of melancholy still drift in and out of his conversation. It is his habit to dismiss them with some stoic statement or other. “Just get on with it,” he tells himself at one stage, “stop talking about it.” But they always come back. He turns 85 next month and has lived in the US since the mid-1970s. The country has been on his mind even longer. He heard cataclysmic news from his shores and thought, “My God, what a place!” His memories are as much like a daydream as a shopping list. “Kennedy was assassinated. Oswald killed a few days later. Before that, the confrontation between Kennedy and Khrushchev. I was an actor in a provincial rep. My father said, “If the bomb falls, you won’t know much about it. It is us who will have to suffer the consequences here in Wales.’ A few weeks later I went to see him. He said, “That was nothing, was it? In 1939, when you were a baby, Neville Chamberlain declared war on the most powerful military machine ever. Six years later, Hitler lost his mind.” His subject? “We survive.” Hopkins at the time of Armageddon. Photo: Everett Collection/Alamy The theme is similar to the film we’re talking about today: Armageddon Time, James Gray’s autumnal, autobiographical drama about a Jewish family in Brooklyn at the dawn of the 1980s. Hopkins plays Aaron Rabinowitz, a grandfather from mother of 11-year-old Paul (Banks Repeta). She brings him gifts, including a rocket that they launch together at Flushing Meadows. The kid hears a voice (“Thank you, honey”) while the old man talks like an after-school cartoon (“Yabba-dabba-doo!”). The script was originally written for Gray’s grandfather. Robert De Niro was in talks to play the role. When that plan fell through, Gray recast the role in the image of his other grandfather, and Hopkins immediately came to mind. The title alludes to the apocalyptic leanings of incoming president Ronald Reagan, as well as the Clash song Armagideon Time, but it also foreshadows the existential dread that pervaded most of that decade and has lately returned in spades. Some members of the Trump family, played by actors including Jessica Chastain, make an appearance. Given the state of the world today, does Hopkins think the film is relevant? “What did I do; Timely? What do you mean?” Before I can explain, he’s in a different tack: “Let me put it this way. I liked James’ vision of the past. America has gone through so many changes that we lose track of them. Memory plays fake with you. It’s never accurate and it’s not exactly a lie. You only get a kind of dream sequence. But I have a very good memory.” How did he feel when Reagan became president? “Oh, I can’t remember. It was so long ago.” . “It became clear that Bob hadn’t read the whole script” … Hopkins and Hoskins in Othello, 1981. Photo: Everett Collection/Alamy He was also frantically busy, as always. One of the projects he was preparing for at the time was the lead role in the 1981 BBC production of Othello, directed by Jonathan Miller. Hopkins made a dubious history as the last white actor to play the role on British television. “I couldn’t do that now,” he says, referring to blackface. Bob Hoskins was his Iago. “Wonderful Bob! When he entered, his accent sounded very refreshing. Then it became clear that he hadn’t read the entire script.” Hopkins does an odd impression of his cockney co-star: “Jesus, are these all my lines? Are these the verbal ones? I’m in big trouble, Tone!’ I told him, “You better find out.” He was awesome.” When he thinks about arriving in the US in the early 1970s, it is Watergate that comes most clearly to his mind. At the time he was in London preparing to go to New York to appear on stage in Equus. “I heard all this news from America and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ll be there soon.’ When I arrived, the jokers were selling Nixon masks. I stayed at the Algonquin. I can remember looking at the light, the sky, and thinking, “This is America!” I don’t know what it was. A light peculiar to that country. I felt a nostalgia for it in a way. We often talk about the good old days but, oh, I don’t know. Good old days, bad old days, life goes on. I just came out here and got stuck. I’m really a drifter.” Oliver Stone’s Nixon, from 1995. Photo: TCD/ProdDB/Alamy Among the numerous real-life figures in his filmography (including Picasso, Hitchcock and Pope Benedict XVI), he played both Nixon (in the 1995 Oliver Stone film) and Hitler (in the 1981 TV movie The Bunker) , earning an Oscar nomination. for the former and won an Emmy for the latter. “A producer, a young man, came up to me on the set and said, ‘Can you make Hitler less human?’ I said, “No, because he was human.” Hopkins was surprised to be nominated for Nixon. “Oliver said to me, ‘I’ve read interviews with you and I think you can play him.’ I said, “What, you mean I’m crazy and paranoid?” He said, “Yes, all these things.” I jumped in with both feet.” In addition to Stone, he has been directed by Steven Spielberg (Amistad), David Lynch (The Elephant Man), Francis Ford Coppola (Bram Stoker’s Dracula), Julie Taymor (Titus) and Woody Allen (You Will Meet a Tall Dark). Foreign). What does he look for in a director? “Those who are intelligent and do not pretend to be God. They are working people like everyone else. I don’t go on set to try to dominate. My way is to say, “Can I try this? Does that make you?” His wife, Stella, directed him a few years ago as a psychiatrist in her film Elyse. “He had left me, he did,” she laughs. Special affection is reserved for the late Jonathan Demme, who played him in The Silence of the Lambs as Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter. Hopkins’ performance earned him the first of two Best Actor Oscars, as well as two more bites of the cherry in Hannibal and Red Dragon. “I don’t know why Jonathan put me in, but he trusted me. He would laugh because he thought I was outrageous.” The actor’s idea was to have Lecter already standing in his cell when he is first approached by FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster). “He can smell her, you see. I told Jonathan and he said, “Oh, my God. You really are curious, Hopkins!” He once described himself as the “troublemaker” on the set of the 1998 fantasy drama Meet Joe Black, co-starring Brad Pitt. “Marty Brest, the director, wonderful man, would take after take,” he explains. “I never knew why. I told him one day, “I don’t have long to live. Can we finish the scene?’ It was crazy. It said, “One more.” And I was like, “No, I’m going home now, I’m tired.” Brad might have thought I was a little difficult. But I was convinced that we would never reach the end.” Many viewers felt the same way. “It’s going on, isn’t it?” Get a front row seat to the cinema with our weekly email packed with all the latest news and all the cinema action that matters Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. With Olivia Colman in The Father. Photo: Sean Gleason/AP Hopkins’ mind is jumping all over the place as we speak, recalling childhood memories of accompanying his father to his bread, then zooming back to Armageddon Time. One word that keeps repeating, though, is “easy.” Making The Father, Florian Zeller’s devastating story about the mental breakdown of a man with Alzheimer’s, was “very easy,” he says, despite the subject matter. “I didn’t do anything, really. I said yes and Olivia Colman became my daughter.” He must have done something else to win the Oscar for best actor. “Well, I try not to mess it up by interfering. You make sure that the catering is good, that you are somewhere comfortable on the set and that you don’t hit the furniture. Acting gets easy as you get older. You stop getting carried away by it.” He also appears briefly in The Son, Zeller’s upcoming sequel, in which he has a uniquely villainous scene. He has yet to watch Armageddon and is in no rush to return to the cinema. “This Covid business is back again. I’m not hiding, but at my age I don’t want to risk it.” He is at the piano every day (“I was playing this morning, some Rachmaninoff”) and often paints in his studio. His art has been exhibited around the world. “I’ll probably do some this afternoon,” he says brightly. I was wearing my coat because my character was dying. And I thought: “That’s my grandfather” Talking about the Hour of Armageddon today, however, has allowed all kinds of memories to rush in as he lies on his bed staring out at the ocean. “The man I play looks a lot like my maternal grandfather,” she says. “He and I were very close. It gave me a lot of confidence to get on with life.” It was while shooting that scene in Flushing…
