Anthony Hopkins is writing his autobiography
Sir Anthony Hopkins has revealed that he is writing an autobiography, which he finds “bizarre”.
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Dr. Hannibal Lecter receives special attention in Anthony Hopkins’ upcoming memoir.
In We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir (Summit Books/Simon & Schuster, November 4), the 87-year-old Hopkins admits that when he first heard the title of Silence of the Lambs, he thought it was a children’s movie. But just 15 pages into the script, the esteemed actor of stage and screen felt such a primal longing to play the character of an outwardly civilized, cannibalistic serial killer that he could read no further.
“I called my agent and said, ‘Is this an offer?'” Hopkins told USA TODAY. “He said, ‘It’s not that big of a part.’ I said, ‘I’d like to do it.’ It’s life changing. ”
Hopkins’ life changed forever after his iconic performance in a cat-and-mouse game with FBI agent trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 psychological thriller, Hannibal the Cannibal. Dr. Lecter still rules Hell, earning him the top spot on the American Film Institute’s “100 Greatest Villains” list (sorry, third place goes to Darth Vader).
In this special excerpt from the chapter “Fava Beans and Lovely Chianti,” Hopkins talks about his real-life inspiration for the dark Dr. Lecter. This chapter begins with the proud Welsh actor’s first Silence of the Lambs encounter with Demi, a producer who supported Hopkins’ casting and was surprisingly skeptical.
Exclusive excerpt from Anthony Hopkins’ memoir ‘We Did OK, Kid’
“Don’t you want an American actor?” I asked Jonathan Demme.
He laughed and said, “Don’t you want to do it?”
“Yes, I am,” I said. (Don’t ask questions, dummy! i said to myself. ) “I really think so.”
A producer who was present confessed, “I certainly had doubts about a British actor playing this American assassin.”
“Well, that’s fine,” I said. “I’m not English, I’m Welsh.”
I knew they didn’t have to worry because I had an instinctive sense of exactly how Hannibal should be played. There’s a devil inside me. We all have demons within us. I know what scares people. The key is to simultaneously embody two inner attitudes that often do not coexist. He was far away and awake at the same time.
I encountered these two things as one entity once, very early in my life, and it became part of my childhood subconscious. I had an extreme phobia of spiders. Unfortunately, our house was old and there were crawling and jumping creatures all over the place. One night when I turned on the light in my father’s bakery, there was a huge black spider right next to the switch. Patient, yet completely alert. I almost jumped off the roof.
That was the effect I wanted as Hannibal. I wanted to be a spider in my father’s bakery. That way, as soon as the camera was pointed at my father, it would be obvious that he was ready and still. Staring at people for long periods of time makes me very anxious. Remoteness draws the witness, or victim, forward and into the circle of the predator’s persona.
I remembered what I had learned about psychological gestures and intuited the inner workings of Hannibal Lecter’s head. Blueprint: Remove the moving elements of weight and sensing, or intention, into the background. Lecter’s main power was his insight and persistent intuition. This can be seen in the perfect clarity of his speech.
After I started acting in movies, I tried really hard to stay still. Because I’m not very good at direct, sustained attention for long periods of time. And for this role, I had to cultivate that temperament to the extreme. Hannibal needed to be both awake and remote in order to create a captivating charisma. The way there is through stillness.
The day of the first table read, I didn’t have a chance to talk to Jodie Foster before we started. We jumped in there. I don’t usually give my best performance during Omoteyomi, but I wanted to show what I can do, so I made it as scary as possible.
As it turns out, this was pretty scary. You could have heard a pin drop in the room. A few seconds after I started speaking as Lecter, I could see Jody tense up. She later confirmed that she had been petrified. And the small distance between us remained throughout the filming.
In my first meeting with Clarice, Jonathan Demme asked me what I wanted to do when she came down that dark hallway to interview me in my cell.
“Do you want to draw? Do you want to read?” Demi said. “Are you sleeping? Are you sitting on your bunk?”
“No,” I said, thinking of the spider on the wall of the bakery. “I want to stand quietly and wait for her.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I can smell her coming from the hallway.”
“Oh my god, you’re so sick, Hopkins,” Deme said, and he laughed.
He thought it was very creepy, but that’s exactly how it was.
I went on to explain that Lecter had to act like a very civilized person. For example, I insisted the costume designer give me a slim-fitting prison jumpsuit instead of baggy clothes. I said Lecter would pay someone to do it for him because he was concerned about that.
So when Clarice comes down a hallway full of lunatics screaming and throwing things at her, here is Dr. Lecter at the end of the hallway, standing politely in a tailored jumpsuit and greeting her with unblinking concentration. He’s a monster, but he’s a monster who moves silently through the night.
He also evoked his childhood experience of impersonating Bela Lugosi at boarding school. When I was a kid, I went to see his “Dracula.” It was one of the first thick books I ever read. In this book, the main character, Jonathan Harker, cuts himself with a razor and feels Dracula’s infatuation. The sounds I imagined Dracula making in that moment, craving Harker’s blood, were a very specific combination of hissing and slurping.
This is where the sounds I made with my lips as Hannibal, the sounds that are often imitated, came from. Thank you, Dracula.
Copyright © 2025 Anthony Hopkins. From the upcoming book WE DID OK, KID: A Memoir by Anthony Hopkins, published by Summit Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed with permission.
