News: Anthony Hopkins

After taking on just one of the many interesting roles in this week’s Bobby, Hopkins will be taking a far more prominent position in his next outing – as writer, director and star of the wilfully experimental Slipstream, a surreal, existentialist Charlie Kauffman-style tale of an aging screenwriter whose characters start to appear in the real world, prompting much musing on the nature of reality, memory and death. Fun may not be the word, but it certainly sounds intriguing, with good reports this week from the Sundance Film Festival, where it’s just had its first screenings.

After that, it’s back to more familiar fare for Hopkins with Fracture (due in the Spring), where he’ll play a Hannibal Lecter-style intelligent murderer, as the wise older man in academia-set drama The City of Your Destination, and as yet another Butler, opposite Morgan Freeman, in Harry and the Butler (both due 2008).

Initially likely to attract most excitement, however, is the big budget adaptation of Dark Age classic Beowulf, where Hopkins will take on the put-upon King Hrothgar opposite Ray Winstone’s Beowulf and a monstrous Grendel voiced by Crispin Glover. And, in terms of full-on Hopkins-acting-his-guts-out potential, his turn as novellist Leo Tolstoy, opposite Paul Giamatti and Meryl Streep, in biopic The Last Station could prove one to excite the awards panels in a year or two, as the aging writer frets over combining his wealth and fame with his high principles. Not something, on the evidence of Slipstream, that Hopkins has much difficulty in doing.

News: Anthony Hopkins

Veteran Hopkins may be about to hit his 69th birthday (on 31st December), but he’s certainly not showing his age in terms of workload, with three more films already wrapped since finishing his duties on this week’s All the King’s Men.

The one he’ll be most keen to see do well is Slipstream – largely because not only does he star, but also wrote and directed this surreal psychological exploration of a screenwriter (played by Christian Slater) who starts becoming unable to distinguish between fact and fiction. No release date has yet been set, but then again, it is still in post-production.
Next up, Hopkins looks to be moving back to his most commercially successful role as serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Only it seems that copyright has prevented the producers of Fracture from using that name, so instead Hopkins will be known as the altogether less sinister-sounding Ted, a psycho hounding a young assistant DA. Again, a UK release date has yet to be set, though it is out in the States in the Spring. Another familiar role will be in the recently-announced Harry and the Butler, where Hopkins will – following his acclaimed role in 1993’s The Remains of the Day – play a butler, this time hired by an aging blues man, to be played by Morgan Freeman.

Most promising of all, however, the Welsh national treasure will be cropping up as the beseiged King Hrothgar in Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis’s much-anticipated cinematic adaptation of the ancient epic poem Beowulf. With Ray Winstone in the title role and supported by the likes of John Malkovich, Robin Wright Penn, Crispin Glover and Angelina Jolie, it looks all set to be one of the biggest films of Christmas 2007.