Jodie Foster (“The Mauritanian”) and Anthony Hopkins (“The Father”) reunited for a virtual chat for Variety’s Actors on Actors series, presented by Amazon Studios. For more, pick up the Jan. 20 issue of Variety, or stay tuned on Variety.com.
A little over 30 years ago, Anthony Hopkins received a script that he thought was a children’s story. But when he cracked it open, there was no turning back — it was the best screenplay he’d ever read. The rest, of course, is movie history. “The Silence of the Lambs,” which opened on Feb. 14, 1991, swept the Oscars the following year, winning five statuettes, including best actor for Hopkins’ serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter and best actress for Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling, the FBI trainee who pries into Lecter’s head in order to catch another killer.
Reunited for an hour over video chat, Hopkins and Foster fell into a familiar rhythm old war buddies might share — including referring to one another by their characters’ names. The good times may roll on for cinema’s most famous cannibal and the one interrogator he couldn’t crack: They might be reunited at this year’s Oscars. In Florian Zeller’s “The Father” (Sony Pictures Classics), Hopkins plays Anthony, a man struggling with dementia. In Kevin Macdonald’s “The Mauritanian” (STX Entertainment), Foster, who has lately focused on directing, plays a defense attorney who fights to free her innocent client from his jail cell in Guantanamo Bay. Three decades after becoming the movie world’s archetypal good cop, Foster’s quest for justice continues.