Anthony Hopkins has dismissed rumours that he and his Silence of the Lambs co-star Jodie Foster didn’t get along on the set of the Oscar-winning film, calling them “publicity crap”.
The 1991 horror-thriller saw Foster play rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling, who must seek help from imprisoned cannibalistic murderer Dr Hannibal Lecter in order to capture a killer at large. Both actors won Oscars for their performances. Foster has long admitted that she was scared of Hopkins during production of the film, but Hopkins has now claimed this was overegged.
“I met Jodie, and she was very nice,” Hopkins said on a recent episode of the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard podcast. “There’s quotes that Jodie never spoke to me. That’s not true. We were quite friendly. There’s nothing spooky about it. That’s publicity crap.”
In 2021, however, Foster did say that the pair kept a reasonable amount of distance on the set.
“We didn’t speak too much before the actual read-through [of the script],” she told Variety. “And as you launched into Hannibal Lecter, I felt a chill come over the room. In a way, it was like we were almost too scared to talk to each other after that.”
In 2016, during an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Foster suggested much the same thing, declaring “[I] never spoke to [Hopkins]. He was scary”.
Hopkins has lately been promoting his memoir We Did OK, Kid, in which he discusses his life and career, and notably his estrangement from his daughter.
He writes at one point about his relationship with Foster, recalling the pair admitting to feeling “a strange sense of distance during the shoot, due no doubt to the power of that script, which had us playing a cat-and-mouse game”. But he clarified that the pair, in the aftermath of filming, have always got along whenever they run into each other.
In his review of the memoir, The Independent’s Louis Chilton wrote that We Did OK, Kid gives “frustratingly short shrift” to Hopkins’s film career, which is skimmed over throughout the book.