Anthony Hopkins to play Sigmund Freud (and a little Oscar history)

by Nathaniel R

Hopkins image via The Guardian

Sir Anthony Hopkins, who is now 84, is in the middle of a late career golden period winning a much-deserved second Oscar for The Father and now getting mostly glowing reviews for a grandfather role in Armageddon Time.  He'll also appear in The Father 's thematic sequel The Son late this year, though this time he doesn't have the leading titular role. Yesterday we learned that Hopkins is set to play Sigmund Freud in a new film called Freud's Last Session. Announcements about famous actors doing biographical roles is not particularly noteworthy as it seems to happen about 24 times each year. But this news is amusing and interesting given Hopkins film history...

The movie is based on the play of the same name by Mark St Jermain and this is where it gets interesting. The film is not a traditional biopic in that it's covering a meeting of the minds that did not actually happen, between the most famous psychoanalyst of all time and the author C.S. Lewis. The play was inspired by Armand Nicholi's non-fiction book "The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life". There's no word on who will play C.S. Lewis but the news that Hopkins will play Freud in this two-hander context is particularly fun in a meta way since Hopkins already played CS Lewis in the biopic Shadowlands (1993). Whoever his co-star is, he'll essentially be following in Hopkins footsteps.

SHADOWLANDS (1993)

Hopkins would surely have been Oscar nominated for Shadowlands (his co-star Debra Winger was for Best Actress) but for the fact that he had Remains of the Day released the same year which was a more popular and acclaimed film. You can't be nominated twice in the same acting category in any given year. Even if you get enough votes to place twice in the always five-wide list, the performance with the lesser votes is jettisoned for a sixth place finisher. We don't know if this has ever happened since Oscar doesn't release vote totals but it's fun to imagine it has when an actor had a very good year (say, Nicole Kidman in 2001). We don't imagine it's happened anytime in the past 20 years though since it's the new norm to lie when campaigning so if an actor or actress has two meaty leading roles in one year one of them will be pitched as supporting no matter how ludicrous. Remember when they tried that with Kate Winslet for The Reader  because Revolutionary Road was also garnering Oscar buzz? It worked at the Globes but not at the Oscar, which was kind of odd since the Globes are generally better about denying category fraud campaigns than Oscar voters are).

More fun trivia: Hopkins will also be following in someone else's footsteps. Several actors have played Sigmund Freud on stage or screen already including Montgomery Clift (Freud: The Secret Passion, 1962), Alan Arkin (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, 1976), Sir Alec Guiness (Lovesick, 1983), and Viggo Mortensen (A Dangerous Method, 2011)

Comments

[DK]

There's a certain reserve and humility about Anthony Hopkins that casts him as a working actor, never fully "set" or "established" the way lots of big leading men are in Hollywood.

It's easy to forget he's a "Sir" with a BAFTA Fellowship, a Cecil B. DeMille award, two Oscars...anything there is do, he's done. But he's still very easy to root for.

The "backlash" following his second win over Chadwick Boseman lasted all of five minutes once people realized A) he deserved it and B) he's Anthony Hopkins.

[jules]

I think perhaps the two greatest Best Actor wins of my Oscar-watching lifetime are Hopkins's two wins! I'm very happy for his late career resurgence. Armageddon Time has become one of my most anticipated, casting him as a wise and gentle grandpa seems like a stroke of genius.