(Credits: Far Out / Artificial Eye)
Thu 8 January 2026 18:45, UK
It’s no secret that Anthony Hopkins isn’t the biggest fan of what cinema has become, but because he’s a working actor who loves his job and has no intentions of retiring until he’s wheeled out of Hollywood in a wooden box, he’ll continue to grin, bear it, and get on with his job.
He bristles at the towering shadows that Marlon Brando and James Dean have cast over the profession, with the two-time Academy Award winner openly lamenting that so many up-and-coming actors have been inspired by the seminal duo that he can barely hear a bloody word they’re saying anymore.
In addition to his pair of Oscars, Hopkins’ trophy cabinet also contains four Baftas, two Primetime Emmys, an Olivier Award, and countless more, but he can’t stand awards shows, either. They’ve been very good to him over the years, especially when he got old enough to start picking up those lifetime achievement prizes, but he’d much rather stay at home if given the choice.
He’s always been an outspoken character, which hasn’t always been beneficial to his career, but at least it’s a refreshing change of pace from the onslaught of homogenised movie stars who’ve mastered the art of saying a lot without really saying anything at all. Either Hopkins doesn’t know how to do that, or he doesn’t want to.
One modern innovation that clearly rankled was the way in which the new wave of directors who emerged in the 1990s opted to eschew traditional camerawork in favour of more innovative, ambitious, and audacious visual tricks. David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Jonathan Glazer, and Antoine Fuqua were among them, but in terms of box office and cultural cache, none of them found more success than Michael Bay.
He wasted no time in becoming one of blockbuster cinema’s biggest names, and while his films weren’t critical darlings, they could always be relied on to turn a tidy profit. Hopkins would eventually call him a “genius” when they collaborated on Transformers: The Last Knight, but he wasn’t always sold on the prospect of big-screen ‘Bayhem’.
“You know, you follow the bomb down to the deck of the ship in Pearl Harbor, but these things, they’ve got nothing to do with anything,” he remarked. “It’s all mindless gobbledygook. It’s entertaining, but it’s not my cup of tea, maybe it’s for a youthful audience. The video directors, they’re all good, I guess. But they tend to be real control freaks.”
In Pearl Harbor‘s defence, the titular attack sequence is a spectacular, jaw-dropping extended set piece that might be the best thing that Bay has ever committed to film. Unfortunately, that only accounts for around 40 minutes of the picture’s 183-minute running time, and almost everything else that happens on either side of it is utterly woeful.
It did win an Oscar for ‘Best Sound Editing’, though, and it made $450 million from cinemas, but that’s nowhere near enough to make it anything approaching a good film, and Hopkins’ “mindless gobbledygook” comments might even be underselling it.
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