Hannibal Does Comedy

Hopkins explains shifting from a thriller like Hannibal to a comedy wasn’t intentional. “I never make conscious decisions,” Hopkins told Empire Online. “If my agent says to me it’s a good script, I do it. I don’t plan and plot out things. I’m at the roulette table and my luck seems to be running at the moment, and I may as well stay there until it runs out.”

And is he looking forward to working on a comedy after playing the iconic villain? “Oh yeah, I’ve got a great sense of humor,” Hopkins smiles. “I mean I’m always cast as these strange men…That’s not me, really. People say, ‘Why don’t you play a comedy?’ Well, I don’t know. People give me whatever they give me, what they think I can do, so why change the rules? But this script came up with Chris Rock, and I’m looking forward to doing it. I suppose it’s like an actor’s dream to work in good American, Hollywood commercial movies when it’s time to be retiring, I guess. So I think, ‘I’ll go on until they stop offering me this stuff.’”

Hopkins has also just finished work on The Devil And Daniel Webster, the directorial debut of his co-star in The Edge Alec Baldwin. “It’s been a passion of his to do for some time,” Hopkins says of the project. “And sometime last year he offered me the part, and I don’t know, for some reason I couldn’t do it. And I read it again, and at the eleventh hour, I was able to do it."

He’s quite a powerhouse,” Hopkins says of Baldwin. “He works very hard. He’s very well-prepared. We condensed about eight days’ work into three days on one scene…He’s a very bright man, a very clever man…He’s a great leader, he has great resources of energy and intellect. He’s a real, living example of how you can make a film fast, if you choose to, instead of all this self-indulgence that some of the directors (and) the big studios do.”