How did they get Anthony Hopkins for Transformers? One breakfast with Michael Bay was enough

Transformers: The Last Knight is the fifth film in Paramount's live-action franchise and the last one Michael Bay directed. It came out on June 21, 2017. Hopkins plays Sir Edmund Burton, the 12th Earl of Folgan, an astronomer and historian who knows the secret history of the Transformers on Earth and lives on an English estate with a robot butler. Mark Wahlberg returns as Cade Yeager, and the film introduces Laura Haddock as Oxford professor Viviane Wembly.

The character came first

Hopkins was in the script before he was in the cast. Co-writer Ken Nolan told Empire that the team invented an English castle-dweller named Sir Edmund Burton: "we said, 'He's an Anthony Hopkins-type character.'"

"Two days later Michael's like, 'So, we've got Anthony Hopkins,'" Nolan said. "It's good to be Bay, everybody says yes."

Bay told the same story at the film's London premiere: "The writers said they wanted someone like Anthony Hopkins to play this character." Then he simply called. "We called him up and he said he would love to do it."

The casting was announced in June 2016 on the franchise's Twitter account: "The man, the myth, the legend."

The breakfast

What actually sold Hopkins was the meeting. At CinemaCon in April 2017, he told Yahoo Movies what Bay talked about over breakfast. It wasn't the plot. It was the robots: how Bay works with the effects team to refine every Transformer, down to "the details of the light on the metal and all that."

"He told me all that at breakfast before I started on the film."

Hopkins came away convinced: "I thought, 'This guy's a genius, he really is.'" He then put Bay in company most critics wouldn't: "He's of the same ilk as Oliver Stone, Spielberg, and Scorsese." His final word on it: "I mean, he is a savant."

He had seen the first two Transformers films before the offer came. After he said yes, he caught up on the other two and pronounced them "terrific."

On set

Working with Bay, Hopkins found, meant speed: "You move fast; you don't have time to think."

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Bay, for his part, discovered that the Oscar winner wanted to be silly. "He is great at improv," Bay said at the premiere, adding that Hopkins told him he "hasn't had this much fun for nine years," because "no one lets him be funny."

Hopkins wasn't the only British actor Bay landed that easily. Burton's butler, Cogman, is voiced by Jim Carter, Carson from Downton Abbey. "Michael Bay asked if I would do it and I didn't think twice," Carter said, noting that this butler "is a little bit different to Carson."

How it turned out

The Last Knight made $605.4 million worldwide, but its $44.7 million US opening was the franchise's lowest, and it sits at 16% on Rotten Tomatoes. At the 38th Razzies, it led the nominations, and one of them went to Hopkins for Worst Supporting Actor, shared with Collide. At 80 years and 22 days, he became the oldest nominee in the history of that category. Mel Gibson won it instead, for Daddy's Home 2.

Three years later, Hopkins set another age record: in April 2021, at 83, he became the oldest Best Actor winner in Oscar history, for The Father.

Previously we wrote: Why did The Golden Compass fail? The director says the studio took the movie away from him after he shot it