Anthony Hopkins is most affecting when he gives us something small and exact to watch: a hand, a pause, an avoided subject. His control can be chilling, but we value the tenderness it permits.
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In One Life (2023), Hopkins keeps Nicholas Winton’s hands busy with papers, a towel and a scrapbook. Closing the book a little too quickly tells us how reluctant Winton is to discuss his past, without making him explain himself. We watch the tidying because Hopkins makes it a way of changing the subject. With Lena Olin as Grete, he settles into the ease of a marriage whose small exchanges no longer need much explanation. These are modest things to build a performance from, and he makes them worth our attention even when the film proceeds more cautiously than it needs to.
The quiet has not always been comforting. His breakthrough as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) made controlled speech threatening; James Stevens in The Remains of the Day (1993) used comparable restraint to keep feelings unspoken. He later lent Odin his authority in Thor (2011), while The Father (2020) gave his smaller changes of expression more weight. The exact delivery can sound theatrical in stage adaptations, and commercial spectacle sometimes gives him too little to do. He prepares by reading scripts repeatedly and memorising them until he can act instinctively.
Careful preparation cannot solve The Son (2022), directed by Florian Zeller. Hopkins gives Anthony an unpleasant coldness, lending force to the film’s interest in what parents pass on to their children. We believe in the chill, but it cannot make up for a screenplay that spends more time on adult guilt than on the boy at its centre. Hugh Jackman finds some painful uncertainty in the same material, so Hopkins is not the only actor doing useful work. We would not recommend the film simply for his contribution.
James Hawes’s One Life gives him more to work with, though the Prague passages have a flat, televisual look. We cried because Hopkins remained so still while the camera held on him, even as the film’s prompting was plain. That response does not make the surrounding storytelling any less conventional. It does show what can happen when a director allows him to do almost nothing and trusts us to notice. For the gentler Hopkins, try One Life, provided a careful, familiar drama is what the evening calls for.
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Biography
Sir Anthony Hopkins is a Welsh actor. After graduating from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in 1957, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He joined the Royal National Theatre in 1965 following an invitation from Laurence Olivier.
Hopkins achieved recognition in film with his role as Richard the Lionheart in The Lion in Winter (1968). He is known for his performances in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Meet Joe Black (1998), the Thor films (2011–2017) as Odin, Westworld (2016) as Dr Robert Ford, The Son (2022) as Anthony, One Life (2023) as Nicholas Winton and Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023) as the voice of Jimmy. He was knighted in 1993 for services to the arts.
