If you want to add a little prestige to your network, you could do no worse than hire Sir Anthony Hopkins and Ian McKellen as leads in the first filmed production of Ronald Harwood’s play “The Dresser” in 30 years. The production, directed by Richard Eyre and also starring Emily Watson, Sarah Lancashire and Edward Fox, depicts some self-doubt as a regional English troupe is about to stage Shakespeare’s “King Lear” as the bombs fall during World War II.
And though he played some famous Shakespearean roles in his 50 years on stage, Hopkins told writers at the TV Critics Association winter press tour Friday about his “odd relationship to Shakespeare in the theater.”
“I came into this profession by accident, really,” he said. “I wanted to be a musician. So I came into this as an outsider.”
But, he added, “with ‘The Dresser,’ I was intrigued by what particular nature it is that makes actors want to act. I’ve always been fascinated by that. Why do actors want to act? Why do they want to do Shakespeare? Why do they night after night after night go on stage and repeat the same performances over and over and over? And this play, ‘The Dresser,’ more or less answers that, that you have to go half mad to survive that kind of life.
“The man I played, Sir, is a man who is obsessed with Shakespeare and obsessed with success, obsessed with the art and obsessed with Lear,” Hopkins says. “It touched something in me.”
That’s because he was familiar with being an outsider, and being unfamiliar with Shakespeare, he said.
“My doing ‘The Dresser’ was a painless revisit to a world that I had known 50 years about something I wasn’t comfortable with. And now I can understand why Sir and so many actors great actors love Shakespeare.”
Hearing his answer, McKellen added, “just confirmed my feeling about this wonderful script,”
“There have been many films, many television, many plays, about what it’s like to be an actor, the backstage story,” McKellen said. “And, frankly, none of them is any good, with the exception of this one.
“I think every actor recognizes themselves and their past in this play. And if you, as an outsider, want to know what it feels like to be in a dressing room and a desperate performance is minutes away, this play tells you exactly what it’s like. And it’s a whole range of characters not just Sir and his dresser but the stage manager and the ingénue girl, just starting out, and the tired other people in the cast, and they’re all in love somehow with the theater, and it rings absolutely true. I think that’s why the play has gone on being so successful over the years and on stage and now back on screen.”
“The Dresser” premieres in the summer.