As he plays an ageing speedster, it seems nothing can slow Anthony Hopkins down. He talks to Belinda McKeon in New York
'What? Anthony Hopkins is here?" The porter in the hotel on Park Avenue spins around to his colleagues, who have just given me directions to the interview suite. He's 60 if he's a day, this porter, and on this job, on this block, he should really have shaken off his susceptibility to surprise a long time ago. Luggage-toting for chihuahuas will tend to do that to a man. But Anthony Hopkins, Sir Anthony Hopkins, upstairs on the third floor - that's a different story. This porter is going to be hanging around the hotel lobby for longer than he has to tonight, you sense. He shows me to the elevator, his eyes still wide.
Hopkins's eyes are piercing - intensely blue and clear. Though he's stockier now, and white-haired, and though age has marked his face with a certain vulnerability, his is still undeniably the presence of a star. If the bodyguard at the door to his suite, and his eccentric personal publicist, talking on the phone in a Southern drawl, didn't give that away, then what surely does is the air of reverence that surrounds Hopkins as he sits, waiting between interviews, at a window onto upper Manhattan. Journalists are ushered in and out of the suite as though into a private ward during visiting hours.
Hopkins, though, is having none of the hush. Ebullient and relaxed, he comes across the room to meet me, his handshake huge and warm, and he wants to ask all the questions: what part of Ireland my accent is from; which county that's nearest to; how I find it, living here. He's probably going to go to Ireland for his wife's next birthday, he says, or at least take the ferry from there across to his native Wales. They'll take the ferry from Dún Laoghaire, rent a car at Holyhead, then drive down the Cardiganshire coast to Port Talbot, in south west Wales, where he was born 68 years ago, and where the relatives and old friends he wants his wife to meet still live.
As Hopkins talks about his home place, it seems that it's his memories of Wales, these days, which give him pause for thought. Much more so, even, than the fact of having received the Cecil B DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement at last month's Golden Globes. An award like that might stir an actor to take stock, to assess, to cast a long glance back over his career - a career which, in Hopkins's case, has lasted over five decades and run the gamut from Chekhov to cannibalism, with a Best Actor Oscar for the latter turn, as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and nominations in the same category for Remains of the Day (1993) and Nixon (1995). He's played Hitler and Henry Wilcox, Picasso and Ptolemy, CS Lewis and Hamlet's Claudius, with Othello and Quasimodo thrown in for good measure. Still, when Hopkins looks back, it's not the roles, but the unlikely road towards them, that he sees. Specifically, he says, holding his palm out as though to show me something hidden there, he sees an image of a small boy in wartime Wales, the only son of the Port Talbot baker.
"My wife keeps it," he says, "a little brown photograph from when I was four. And it's only recently that I've started looking at that photograph and thinking, who is that? Is that really me?" In 1941, Hopkins was already happier drawing and painting than playing with other children, and as he grew older, he added the piano to that list of interests, but failed continuously at academic pursuits. He was dyslexic as well as disinterested, and could see, he says, no path ahead.
"I had no idea where I was going. I was told that I was never going to be anything, because I was not good at school. My cousin Bobby was in school, and he was brilliant, and now, I see him once in a while, he lives in South Wales in the same house, and the same town, and he was a school teacher, and that's his life. And I found this life."
IT WAS THROUGH an encounter with another Port Talbot actor, Richard Burton (who was brought up in the town by his sister after the early death of his mother) that Hopkins found the acting life. By the early 1950s, Burton was a Hollywood star, and the young Hopkins tracked him to his sister's house on one of his visits home. Hopkins was looking for an autograph; inspired by Burton's success, and his sports car, he found also the idea of a career.
"And I think, how did any of that happen?" he says, speaking slowly, carefully, as though ruminating as he goes. "And I think, isn't it extraordinary, the power of destiny. But I don't understand it. And it's best not to try to understand it too much."
Hopkins is in reflective mode, and it's partly because of the questions that are arising out of his latest role, that of Burt Munro, the ageing speed freak of Roger Donaldson's The World's Fastest Indian. Donaldson's biopic grew out of a long-time obsession (including a 1972 documentary) with Munro, an eccentric 68-year-old from southernmost New Zealand, who in 1967 decided to travel to the annual Speed Week at the treacherous Utah Salt Flats. He went there not to cheer on the master racers, but to compete against them, with a motorcycle so ancient and customised that it was virtually homemade - cork stopping up the gas tank, a kitchen implement where a hinge should be, no brakes and no apologies.
What happened next is still in the history books, because the land speed record of 201mph (323.5km/h) set by Munro at the event - in which officials allowed him to participate simply because they wanted to humour an old man - has never since been broken.
While gently entertaining, Donaldson's film is inoffensive to a fault, shirking consideration of the forces that drove Munro in favour of harmless charm and comedy, a wilfully naive alternative to David Lynch's The Straight Story. Yet Hopkins manages to draw out of the sweetness something genuinely memorable and affecting; funny, yes, but moving also.
What fuels this fillip of power is the clear-eyed awareness of his own mortality with which Hopkins invests Munro. Staring death in the face - as he does at several points in the film, including one speed scene in which Hopkins did his own stunts, an experience he sums up now with a long, slow grimace - his Burt is resolute, unsentimental, pragmatic. He's frightened at moments, but he gets on with the business of living rather than let the fear of what comes afterwards get to him. It's an attitude, says Hopkins, with which he can readily identify.
"Well, I've always been aware that I'll be here but once, and that you'd better enjoy it," he smiles. "I really don't have any convictions about God, or life after death." He pauses, and seems to reconsider, as though this is too final. Maybe it is like Burt Munro puts it, he says, assuming the Invercargill accent, that peculiar mix of Cornish, Irish and New Zealand which he found to be characteristic of the island's southernmost point. "We're just blades of grass, and when we go, we go, we never come back; one life . . . maybe that's true. But I tend to believe that this is not all there is. Because my life has been like a shadow of something deeper. And I've experienced that many times. And especially as I'm getting to the . . . I'm 68 now . . . that there's something more. Maybe that's the human ego, that can't bear the thought of annihilation. But I've had so many extraordinary experiences in my life, synchronistic experiences, coincidences, which are so mind-boggling. I look back, and I think, there's a pattern to it somehow."
CLOUDING UP AT least some of that pattern must be the aggression with which Hopkins approached many of his roles as a younger actor, including that of Captain William Bligh in Roger Donaldson's Bounty, when the pair worked together before, more than 20 years ago. The experience was not a good one; they vowed to avoid each other forever afterwards. Hopkins prefers to shrug that memory off. When Donaldson, who had long been obsessed with Burt Munro's story (he made a documentary, Offerings to the God of Speed, about him in 1973), got back in touch with Hopkins to offer him the part, the hatchet was declared to have been long buried. He looks back and thinks it "extraordinary"; he says now of his relationship with Donaldson "that 20 years ago we wanted to kill each other". On Christmas Day, Hopkins and his wife brought a gift of a sit-on motorcycle to Donaldson's equally Munro-obsessed young son.
"I think when you get older, you become wiser," he says of his new-found mellowness. It's something for which he gives equal credit, however, to Stella Arroyave, his Colombian-born third wife, who he married in 2003, and who, he says, has calmed him. She has encouraged him, also, to take up painting and piano-playing again, and with results: a recent exhibition of Hopkins's landscapes in Mexico made thousands of dollars for a local literacy programme, while a musical collaboration with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics is in the pipeline.
Then there's the matter of Hopkins's upcoming film project, provisionally titled Slipstream, which he has written and plans to direct and play the lead role - with Arroyave as his wife. Eyebrows have been raised in Hollywood; Arroyave, a former antiques dealer, is not an experienced actor, but Hopkins is unbothered. He has energy to burn, these days, and it's energy of the right kind.
"You know, it takes a lot of energy to be angry," he says. "To be angry takes colossal energy. And to want to go on set and create trouble is madness. I never wanted to do that . . . but I was young, and I had some ideas of my own. Which is ok, it's all healthy stuff, isn't it? But before we started this movie, Roger and I, we talked about the last time, and Roger said to me, I was really terrified of you in those days, I never knew what was going to happen. I said, I know, but that's over now. And he said, think we'll have a good time on this one? And I said, yeah. I think we will."
The World's Fastest Indian is showing at 6pm today in Cineworld, Parnell Street as part of the Dublin International Film Festival