A Quote by Anthony Hopkins

I thought I did play one villain, Hitler, [who is] like Lecter in some ways, but he's a mythical figure, anyway. — © Anthony Hopkins
I thought I did play one villain, Hitler, [who is] like Lecter in some ways, but he's a mythical figure, anyway.
I actually thought Pope Paul VI was the most tragic figure in the modern church, like Lyndon Johnson was a very tragic figure in politics in some ways.
I've looked at all of Hitler's speeches thinking that there's gotta be one where he's 'I'm Hitler!', but there weren't any. His speeches were all about hope and prosperity - he ran on a platform of peace and prosperity. Hitler speeches that makes him sound like a villain are pretty hard to find, he was very detached from what he was doing, he kept himself compartmentalised from it.
My favorite movie villain? Oh, that's easy. Hannibal Lecter.
[Hitler thought] that Mussolini was no figure of world history, like der Fuehrer or Stalin.
Villains can often be one note and I would say in that case, it’s not fun to play the villain. It’s fun to play the villain if he a) has dimension and b) the villain gets to do all the things in the movie that in life he would get punished for. In the movie, you’re applauded for them if you do them with panache. And so that’s why it’s more fun to play the villain.
I'd love to play a Bond villain. Yeah, I'd love to play a Bond villain. Everyone always says this to me; they always say, 'You've got to be a Bond villain', 'We're going to make you a Bond villain...' But they've never, ever approached me, I've never had a whiff of it. I think I'd love to play a Bond villain; I'd have great fun.
A 'Hitler myth' was cultivated which built on people's desire for strong leadership, and presented Hitler as an almost God-like figure. Hitler's image was laboured over in a manner not dissimilar to that of pop stars today. What he wore, what he said, what postures he adopted during speeches were all worked out carefully... Many people began to separate Hitler from the Nazi Party, enabling Hitler's popularity to remain high whilst the popularity of the Nazi Party fell.
I can't judge the characters I play, because it's for the audience to do. What I can try to do is to understand and embody what were they going through? How did they make the decisions they made? That to me is a more interesting way to approach something, rather than saying this person is a villain and that person is this and - because it's not very interesting to play that anyway.
I did a play once where a reviewer said, 'Martin Freeman's too nice to play a bad guy.' And I thought: 'Well, bad guys aren't always bad guys, you know?' When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it's false.
If you're playing Hitler, you don't play Hitler as an asshole. Hitler believed what he was doing was right. Any of those monsters and any serial killer believes in what they're doing. I play it subjectively.
I love to play with the notion of who the protagonist is - who is the audience supposed to root for? I did it in 'Sicario' and feel it was the strength of the script - guiding the audience's allegiance toward the villain because they think he's the hero, until it's revealed that he's the villain.
The second type you have at these parades seems to be the people who want to mislabel Hitler. Everybody in the world is Hitler. Bush is Hitler, Ashcroft is Hitler, Rumsfeld is Hitler. The only guy who isn't Hitler is the foreign guy with a mustache dropping people who disagree with him into the wood chipper. He's not Hitler.
You've got to love the villain if you have to play him. You've got to find something that you can live with in yourself if you're going to play the villain in a play on stage.
The Common Law of England has been laboriously built about a mythical figure-the figure of 'The Reasonable Man'.
If you're going to play what-if --which, by the way, is a huge waste of time and energy, not to mention an act of supreme, center-of-the-universe narcissism-- you have to play it both ways. If you're going to imagine yourself as an accidental villain, you have to give yourself equal time as an unwitting hero. As somebody who prevented God-knows-what dire disaster simply by doing exactly the things you did.
I understand being the villain is what people like. People play to that. They want to know about the villain.
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