Anthony Hopkins said his wife, Stella Arroyave, has a theory about him.
“I’m obsessed with numbers. I’m obsessed with detail. I like everything in order. And memorizing,” Hopkins said in an interview in The Sunday Times. “Stella looked it up and she said, ‘You must be Asperger’s.’ I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. I don’t even believe it.”
All to say that Hopkins himself, who married Arroyave in 2003, is not the least bit interested in knowing.
“Well, I guess I’m cynical because it’s all nonsense,” said Hopkins, who’s 87. “It’s all rubbish. ADHD, OCD, Asperger’s, blah, blah, blah. Oh God, it’s called living. It’s just being a human being, full of tangled webs and mysteries and stuff that’s in us. Full of warts and grime and craziness, it’s the human condition. All these labels. I mean, who cares? But now it’s fashion.”
Hopkins said he believes that people perform sympathy, to which he says, “Oh, give me a break.”
Many, including advocacy organization Autism Speaks, would disagree. It says Asperger’s, which is now known as part of autism spectrum disorder, is “a broad range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech and nonverbal communication.” It cites Centers for Disease Control estimates that 1 in 31 children and 1 in 45 adults in the United States are autistic.
Speaking about his new memoir, We Did OK, Kid, the two-time Oscar winner — for The Silence of the Lambs in 1992 and The Father in 2021 — noted that at first he didn’t think it would be interesting, but his wife since 2003 convinced him that he’d lived an extraordinary life people would want to read about.
Anthony Hopkins attends AFI Fest in 2019.
Jon Kopaloff/Getty
One of the experiences that certainly fits into that category is Hopkins’ time working on The Silence of the Lambs, in which he played cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, who is working (toying?) with Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling, the FBI agent who needs his help to stop another serial killer.
Hopkins explained in the same interview that he and his costar hadn’t interacted before they met in character.
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
“We just flew right into it,” he said. “I wanted to show what I could do, so I was as scary as I could be. You could have heard a pin drop in the room. A couple of seconds after I started to speak as Lecter, I saw Jodie grow tense.”
On the last day of filming, Foster confessed that she had been scared of him.
We Did OK, Kid is available at bookstores Nov. 4.
