"I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense... I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash"
About this Quote
A joke with teeth, this is Hopkins kicking the ladder out from under the prestige mythology that’s supposed to hold him up. An actor knighted, canon-adjacent by sheer proximity, claiming “no interest in Shakespeare” is heresy in the Church of British Seriousness. That’s the point. The line dares you to watch the cultural machine whir: the moment you’re deemed “important,” you’re expected to perform reverence for the approved relics.
“I just wanted to get famous” is the grenade. It punctures the comforting story that great actors are motivated by art, tradition, and the noble burden of craft. Hopkins frames ambition as blunt, even grubby, then dismisses the rest as “hogwash,” a word that makes the whole confession sound like pub talk. He’s not confessing so much as mocking the question behind the question: the interviewer’s need for a clean origin myth.
The subtext is less anti-Shakespeare than anti-pretension. Hopkins has played the full menu of cultural legitimacy, from stage-trained gravitas to cinematic monstrosity, and he knows how much “high culture” is also branding. The quote insists that talent and aspiration don’t have to arrive dressed in literature’s best china. It’s also a power move: only someone securely canonized gets to pretend they don’t care about the canon. That tension is where the wit lives. He’s deflating British cultural piety while quietly demonstrating he’s mastered it well enough to shrug it off.
“I just wanted to get famous” is the grenade. It punctures the comforting story that great actors are motivated by art, tradition, and the noble burden of craft. Hopkins frames ambition as blunt, even grubby, then dismisses the rest as “hogwash,” a word that makes the whole confession sound like pub talk. He’s not confessing so much as mocking the question behind the question: the interviewer’s need for a clean origin myth.
The subtext is less anti-Shakespeare than anti-pretension. Hopkins has played the full menu of cultural legitimacy, from stage-trained gravitas to cinematic monstrosity, and he knows how much “high culture” is also branding. The quote insists that talent and aspiration don’t have to arrive dressed in literature’s best china. It’s also a power move: only someone securely canonized gets to pretend they don’t care about the canon. That tension is where the wit lives. He’s deflating British cultural piety while quietly demonstrating he’s mastered it well enough to shrug it off.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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