Latest Breaking News Online News Portal
The Silence of the Lambs star Sir Anthony Hopkins bears a striking resemblance to Sigmund Freud as he plays him in a new film. The actor, 85, tipped his bowler hat to the camera before slipping back into character during the last scenes of Freud’s Last Session, about the founder of psychoanalysis.
He looks unrecognisable from the iconic psychologist turned man-eating serial killer Hannibal Lecter in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs.
The film, starring Downton Abbey star Matthew Goode as CS Lewis, is based on Mark St Germain’s acclaimed play of the same name.
Set on the eve of the Second World War, it imagines Freud’s encounter with the Christian Oxford academic and author of the Chronicles of Narnia. Although they never actually met, their conversations are inspired by their writings.
The film sees them discuss subjects ranging from God to science.
Hopkins and Goode were filmed walking into a church carrying gas masks when this photo was taken at the Ardmore Studios in Dublin.
Meg Thomson, one of the producers of Freud’s Last Session, has described Sir Anthony as “wonderfully attentive creatively.
He gets into great discussions with the director Matt Brown about the staging and how he’s going to perform certain sections”.
In one scene, Lewis says: “You’ve insisted all your life that the very concept of God is ludicrous. So why do you care what I think if you’re satisfied in your disbelief?”
Freud replies: “I want to learn why a man of your supreme intellect could suddenly abandon truth and embrace an insidious lie.”
Lewis asks: “What if it isn’t a lie? Have you ever considered how terrifying it would be to realise you’re wrong?” Freud responds: “Far less terrifying than it would be for you.”
Freud’s north London home – after he left Vienna in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution – has been recreated in the Irish capital for the film.
For the exterior shots, they have used streets in Dublin that closely resembled Hampstead.
The movie explores Freud and Lewis’s lives, including Freud’s relationship with his daughter and Lewis’s unconventional romance with his best friend’s mother, Janie Moore.
Hopkins played Lewis 30 years ago in the acclaimed film Shadowlands, starring Debra Winger as his wife, the American poet Joy Gresham.
