And I think, because I’m eighty-three, I’m closer to that age, that dangerous age when it could happen. And then you work with someone like Olivia, and it makes it so easy. I say, “What do you mean, ‘What happened’?” So those lines, obviously they mean irritation or irascibility. I remember the first day with Olivia Colman, our first scene together, she comes into the room and says, “What’s going on? What happened?”-about the woman I fired. And I watched them saying, “It’s O.K., Pop.” They’d feed him television suppers, and he died very peacefully.īut, to get to a simpler answer: if you follow a superb screenplay, the language is a road map, and so you don’t have to act. He thought the Pacific Ocean was the Hudson River, and he thought his daughter was his wife. The family around him had to cope, had to be patient. I’d only witnessed one moment of dementia, in a friend’s father-in-law. My mother died of old age, actually, at eighty-nine. I’ve never experienced dementia in my own family. Just paint.” I’ve found that’s a good philosophy in life. He said, “Who did these?” I pulled a face and said, “I did.” He said, “Why are you pulling a face like that?” I said, “I have no training.” He said, “Don’t train. Some years ago, Stan Winston, who had created all the monsters for “Jurassic Park,” came for a barbecue or something, and he went into the studio and he saw my paintings. I’ll tell you something interesting, a discovery for me. So now I sell my paintings, and there’s quite a market for them. My wife got me to paint some years ago, because she found some old drawings of mine. I have a Bösendorfer piano, and I hide away down in my basement so that I don’t disturb people. I have no ambitions to play at Carnegie Hall or anything like that, but I do it for my own pleasure. I attempt to do very difficult pieces by Rachmaninoff and Chopin and Scriabin. My mother made me go for music lessons, and I took to it. I understand that’s something you’ve done since childhood, play piano and compose? So I play the piano and I paint and I read a lot. But I did get the vaccination last week, and I’ve got another one coming. I haven’t worked since “The Father,” and, in fact, I’ve been in lockdown for a whole year. But it was entertaining, and I had a lot of lines to learn. How have you been spending the past year? Have you been able to work? Our conversation has been edited and condensed. Over Zoom last week, Hopkins appeared in front of a crowded bookshelf and asked that I call him Tony. He’s now at the forefront of the Academy’s Best Actor race, a year after he was nominated for “ The Two Popes” and three decades after his Oscar-winning role in “The Silence of the Lambs.” As always, Hopkins is a master of onscreen cogitation you can see his character turning over thoughts, or resisting the thoughts that come unbidden. Zeller’s screenplay, adapted with Christopher Hampton, is a kind of labyrinth that plunges the viewer inside the father’s scrambled consciousness: characters suddenly vanish or change faces, settings shift, and we feel the disorientation along with him. It’s one of Hopkins’s finest performances, by turns wrathful and befuddled, helpless and defiant. In “ The Father,” a new film directed by Florian Zeller, based on Zeller’s prize-winning French play, he stars as an old man in the throes of dementia, wrenched between belligerence and confusion as his daughter (Olivia Colman) struggles to care for and contain him. Onscreen, though, Hopkins can still whip up a tempest. On Instagram, he treats his two and a half million followers to tossed-off bits of Chopin from his home in the Pacific Palisades, where he has been quarantining for the past year. Sir Anthony Hopkins had his breakthrough film role in 1968, as Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn’s power-hungry son in “The Lion in Winter.” Half a century and many roles later-among them Richard Nixon, Alfred Hitchcock, Pope Benedict XVI, King Lear (twice), John Quincy Adams, Pablo Picasso, and, of course, Hannibal Lecter-Hopkins is eighty-three and deep into his own lion-in-winter years.