John Hopkins, Actor

John Hopkins is an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company as well as a television actor.

Audio Excerpt

Hopkins does a cold reading of Mark Antony’s famous speech

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Interview Excerpts

ON THEATRE AND TELEVISION

JOHN HOPKINS:  You’re not given, in the majority of television scripts, the breadth of emotion, the breadth of language, the level of hyperbole, which Shakespeare affords you.  So you have to kind of – you have to turn the volume down on your performance.  And at the same time, because you’re moving into television, you have to somehow focus it more, so it’s a little bit like turning two lenses together to get a kind of smaller, sharper, crisper image.  It’s quite a challenge.

ON RECITING FROM  JULIUS CAESAR COLD

JOHN HOPKINS: It was slightly frightening.  And it was – it’s hard to describe.  It’s hard to describe.  Sometimes you get lucky and you stand up and you put your feet on the floor and the words just sort of take over.  And it felt a bit like that.  It felt a bit like being at the wheel of a car but somehow someone else was driving it.  And that’s as pretentious as I’m going to get in talking about Shakespeare.  But it felt a little bit like someone else was steering.