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  • The Guardian

    Bad to the bone: why actors find it so hard to leave their darkest roles behind

    Even the biggest stars are often defined by their turns as villains. Perhaps they should embrace the evil
    by Luke Holland Dec 01, 2020 3 minutes
    Mad, bad and dangerous to know … Misery’s Annie Wilkes (centre) and (clockwise from bottom left) Dracula; Cersei Lannister; Tom Cruise in Collateral; His Dark Materials’ Mrs Coulter; Hannibal Lecter; Hans Gruber. Composite: Guardian

    A quick experiment: Anthony Hopkins is one of history’s most celebrated thesps, a star of stage and screen for more than 60 years. Picture him. What do you see? Is it John Quincy Adams in Amistad? Frederick Treves in The Elephant Man? Or is it Hannibal Lecter, leering through plexiglass, theth-theth-thething into the camera? If you said it’s anything other than that last one, then congratulations. Why not pour yourself a nice glass of chianti to wash down your LIES.

    Of course it was Lecter. That is no slight on those other. And Kathy Bates is a phenomenal actor, but even she must be aware that she hasn’t met anyone for 30 years who didn’t, at some point in the conversation, calculate how far she was from the nearest hammer. These actors are exceptional at what they do, yet it was that same brilliance in these roles (for which each of them won an Oscar) that turned Lecter, Anton Chigurh and Misery’s Annie Wilkes into such inescapable, career-defining figures. The real Hopkins, Bardem and Bates almost seemed like their final victims.

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