In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola directed Bram Stoker’s Dracula, starring Gary Oldman as the alluring vampire and Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing, his stake-toting nemesis. At the time, Hopkins was fresh off his Oscar-winning performance as another legendary monster: Dr. Hannibal Lecter in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs—but he was a Dracula fan going back decades. In his new memoir, We Did OK, Kid, Hopkins looks back at his long career, including the role that would launch a thousand Halloween costumes and fava bean jokes.
A book excerpt published by the British newspaper the Times takes on a period in Hopkins’ career that all horror fans are curious about: when he came aboard Jonathan Demme’s serial-killer thriller and crafted his indelible take on Lecter. He only read 15 pages of the script before deciding it was the best part he’d ever encountered and had to stop reading because he didn’t want to face the disappointment if he wasn’t cast.
Hopkins was cast, of course, and in the excerpt he writes, “I instinctively sensed how to play Hannibal. I have the devil in me. We all have the devil in us. I know what scares people.”
He recalls avoiding his co-star and fellow Oscar winner Jodie Foster during production—in service of the odd dynamic between their characters—though he writes that they’re great friends now. At the time, though, she was a bit afraid of him, he says.
“On the day of the first table reading … 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,” he wrote.
And here’s where Dracula came in: “I also called on my childhood impersonations of Bela Lugosi at boarding school. As a kid, I went to see him in Dracula. That had been one of the first big books I ever read. In the book, the protagonist Jonathan Harker nicks himself with a razor and senses Dracula’s rapt attention. The sound I imagined Dracula made in that moment, thirsting for Harker’s blood, was a very particular combination of hissing and slurping.”
“That’s where I got the sound I made with my lips as Hannibal, the one that gets imitated so much.”
The excerpt ends after he wins the Oscar for Best Actor, so we don’t get any insights into whether or not he gave Oldman any pointers on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We Did OK, Kid is available now.
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