Michele Manelis talks with Anthony Hopkins, star of The Two Popes.
What struck me about this movie was how the art of conversation has fallen by the wayside, probably because of technology. Do you agree?
Well, I am not a sociological critic but maybe ... perhaps the cell phones have
done some harm to us. But I find that through a sense of humour and laughing we give ourselves an openness to other people. Everyone is so angry and bitter today, nobody talks anymore, and everyone is in agony and outraged and you think, 'Oh, come on, we're all going to die!' I can't waste my time being miserable. I just enjoy it all, because if you take it all too seriously, you are dead. And if you have no laughter and no humour in your life you are dead.
Did you enjoy those moments in the movie with Jonathan Pryce, just actor to actor?
Yes. Someone asked me a question the other day, "What drew you to the part?" I said, "Well, I was offered it." That was a good answer. I had never worked with Jonathan before. We saw each other once in a while but I didn't know him although we both are Welshmen. And then I met with Jonathan and we just hit it off. We have two different styles of acting, he's very loose and I tend to be kind of dissonant, I always like to know the lines and we had such a wonderful time and we had jokes together. We had a lot of fun together. Lovely man to work with and, when you are in Rome, you don't need to act very much because it does it for you.
You're playing a pope – can you talk about your spirituality?
Well, it's a very personal thing. I used to be an atheist - or was I was agnostic? But things happened in my life some years ago and I began dawning over the years. And then recently I had an understanding that I'm actually pretty clueless. And it's a wonderful feeling. I was in England doing a film called The Father and my wife is doing a little documentary on my life for some reason, so she interviewed Jodie Foster and people like that. We were in Wales and she went to see a schoolteacher of mine, and she said, "What was he like in school?" And she said, "Terrible, hopeless. We thought there was no hope for him once he left school. He couldn't spell, he couldn't play sports, he wouldn't even be part of the school plays. And then 10 years later, he's Laurence Olivier's understudy!"
