Academy Award-winning Anthony Hopkins recently opened up about a moment of clarity nearly 50 years ago that led him to sobriety and reshaped his understanding of faith, an experience he now attributes to God.
In an interview with The New York Times ahead of the release of his memoir, We Did OK, Kid, the 87-year-old Welsh actor recalled Dec. 29, 1975, when he was driving drunk in California and realized he could endanger others.
“I came to my senses and said to an ex-agent of mine at this party in Beverly Hills, ‘I need help,'” Hopkins said, noting that he checked the time and it was exactly 11 p.m.
What happened next, he said, felt like an “epiphany.”
“Some deep, powerful thought or voice spoke to me from inside and said: ‘It’s all over. Now you can start living. And it has all been for a purpose, so don’t forget one moment of it,'” Hopkins recalled.
Hopkins, who went on to win two Academy Awards and star in films including “The Silence of the Lambs” and “The Remains of the Day,” said he was initially hesitant to talk about the experience because he didn’t want to seem “preachy.”
But since that moment, he said, he’s remained sober. The actor described the voice as “vocal, male, reasonable, like a radio voice,” adding that his desire to drink left him almost instantly.
“I don’t have any theories except divinity or that power that we all possess inside us that creates us from birth, life force, whatever it is,” he said. “It’s a consciousness, I believe.”
Hopkins said a second experience in the late 1970s reinforced his belief. While driving in Los Angeles, he felt compelled to stop at a Catholic church, where he told a priest that he believed he had found God.
“What happened that morning … I knew that was a power way beyond my understanding,” Hopkins said. “Not up there in the clouds, but in here. I chose to call it God. I didn’t know what else to call it.”
In recent years, Hopkins has appeared in several faith-adjacent films, including “Freud’s Last Session,” which explores an imagined conversation between Sigmund Freud, an atheist, and Christian author C.S. Lewis. He was also in the Netflix film “Mary” and starred as Pope Benedict in “The Two Popes.”
In a 2018 appearance at the University of California, Los Angeles, the actor shared how, before becoming sober, he was “very difficult to work with” due to being “hungover.”
In December 1975, when he was “disgusted, busted and not to be trusted,” as he described his condition at the time, he met a woman at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting who asked him, “Why don’t you just trust in God?”
That experience, in part, he said, helped his craving for alcohol to be taken from him, “never to return.”
“I believe that we are capable of so much,” he told the students. “From my own life, I still cannot believe that my life is what it is because I should have died in Wales, drunk or something like that. … We can talk ourselves into death or we can talk ourselves into the best life we’ve ever lived. None of it was a mistake. It was all a destiny.”
The actor also warned the audience against running after money or success.
“If you chase the money, it’s not going to work. And if you chase success, it’s not going to work,” he said. “You just have to chase whatever you want to be, but live it as if it is happening now. Act as if you’re already there, and it’ll fall into place.”
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: leah.klett@christianpost.com
