Anthony Hopkins has spent over six decades building one of the most decorated resumes in film history, headlined by two Academy Awards for Best Actor and a knighthood awarded in 1993 for services to the arts. Born in Margam, Wales, in 1937, Hopkins also holds the BAFTA Fellowship, the organization’s highest honor, awarded to him in 2008 for lifetime achievement. Still, despite a filmography spanning Shakespeare adaptations and prestige television, mainstream audiences most readily associate Hopkins with Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic psychiatrist introduced in The Silence of the Lambs. More recently, a new generation has also come to know him as Odin, the King of Asgard in Marvel’s Thor trilogy.
Hopkins remains one of the busiest actors of his generation, with more than 150 screen credits accumulated since his film debut in the late 1960s. He voiced the robot knight Jimmy across both Rebel Moon films for director Zack Snyder, played Sigmund Freud in Freud’s Last Session, and took on a rare villainous role as William in the 2025 thriller Locked. Hopkins has several more projects lined up, including a Guy Ritchie crime drama titled Wife and Dog alongside Benedict Cumberbatch and Rosamund Pike, and a period piece in which he will play Charles Darwin opposite Charlotte Rampling. That pace of output, sustained well past the age most performers retire, has kept Hopkins visible to movie lovers, with many performances that deserve the same prestige as Hannibal Lecter.
Westworld imagines a high-end amusement park where wealthy guests act out fantasies inside a Wild West setting populated by lifelike androids called hosts. In the series, Anthony Hopkins plays Dr. Robert Ford, the park’s reclusive co-creator, a man who designs the hosts’ personalities and storylines while silencing the park’s dark history and concealing his true intentions.
The first season of Westworld builds its structure around slowly revealing how much control Ford holds over the park, and Hopkins plays that ambiguity by shifting between warmth and menace within single scenes, often without any visible transition between the two. It’s not surprising that the role earned Hopkins an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2017. Even after Ford’s central storyline wrapped, Hopkins kept appearing in flashback sequences that added new context to the character’s motivations, ensuring he would be part of Westworld until the series’ premature cancelation in Season 4.
The Two Popes dramatizes a fictionalized set of private conversations between Pope Benedict XVI (Hopkins) and Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), the future Pope Francis, set in the years surrounding Benedict’s real 2013 resignation from the papacy. Hopkins plays Benedict as a doctrinal traditionalist wrestling privately with doubts his public authority never allowed him to show, which gives him enough nuance to make a seemingly boring subject fascinating.
The screenplay, written by Anthony McCarten and adapted from his own play The Pope, frames the encounter as a conversation between two men who represent opposing visions of the Church’s future, with Hopkins and Pryce also helping each other elevate their performances. Fernando Meirelles directed the film for Netflix, and the story unfolds mostly through extended exchanges between the two actors, a setting that works because they are both formidable. The performance brought Hopkins a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the 2020 Academy Awards, one of three nominations the film received overall, while also adding a major publicly known figure to his career.
Oliver Stone’s 1995 biographical epic Nixon cast Anthony Hopkins as the controversial president, a decision Stone said he made after watching Hopkins’ performance in The Remains of the Day. Hopkins initially turned down the role before Stone convinced him to reconsider, leading to one of the actor’s best performances ever. Stone co-wrote the screenplay of Nixon with Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, blending well-documented history with more speculative material linking Nixon to CIA plots against Fidel Castro, content Stone described at the time as dramatic license but that has since become likely with ressurfacing historical documents.
On his turn, Hopkins resisted a straightforward impression of Nixon’s mannerisms, building his performance instead on Nixon’s paranoia, ambition, and buried insecurity, from a poor Californian upbringing to the presidency and through the Watergate scandal that ended it. The performance brought Hopkins his third Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, one of four Oscar nominations the film received overall, including Joan Allen’s supporting nod as Pat Nixon. Sadly, Nixon underperformed commercially, grossing far less than its $44 million budget, though Hopkins’ performance remains one of the film’s best elements.
Adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel, the 1993 drama The Remains of the Day reunites Anthony Hopkins with his Howards End co-star Emma Thompson and director James Ivory. In the movie, Hopkins plays James Stevens, the fiercely loyal and deeply repressed head butler of Darlington Hall. Dedicated to his profession above all else, Stevens spends the pre-World War II years blindly serving Lord Darlington (James Fox), a British aristocrat with Nazi sympathies, while stubbornly ignoring his own blossoming feelings for the estate’s housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Thompson).
Playing an emotionally repressed man doesn’t give much for a performer to work with, but Hopkins expresses decades of profound longing and heartbreak through mere micro-expressions, such as a stiffening posture or a slight vocal hesitation. Thanks to him, The Remains of the Day becomes a mesmerizing character study of a man realizing too late that he has wasted his life serving a misguided master and denied himself true love. The performance earned Hopkins his second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and remains one of the defining roles of his legendary career.
Florian Zeller’s 2020 psychological drama The Father casts Anthony Hopkins in what’s arguably the most devastating role of his life, playing an aging Londoner (also named Anthony) who is losing his battle with dementia. Adapted by Zeller and Christopher Hampton from Zeller’s own acclaimed stage play, the film brilliantly places the audience directly inside Anthony’s deteriorating mind. Through subtly shifting apartment layouts, non-linear timelines, and actors suddenly swapping roles, the viewer experiences the same terrifying disorientation as the protagonist, as we are also incapable of knowing what exactly is going on and who the people are who suddenly appear right in the next room.
Hopkins anchors The Father with a towering performance that fluctuates rapidly between childlike terror and undeniable charm, with a deep paranoia that even manifest as cruelty. The role culminated in Hopkins winning his second Academy Award for Best Actor at the 2021 Oscars at age 83, surpassing the record set by 76-year-old Henry Fonda to become the oldest Best Actor winner in Oscar history, and topping Christopher Plummer’s mark to become the oldest winner in any competitive acting category. Guinness World Records subsequently recognized Hopkins for the achievement, giving him another award to add to his extensive collection.
