Sir Anthony Hopkins has given another brilliant performance recently, this time as Thing from the Addams Family, following the updated version seen in Wednesday. The 84-year-old actor shared his impression on Instagram on Wednesday, sharing a new video with his 3.9 million followers.
The new Netflix series Wednesday has experienced the second-biggest streaming week of all time, becoming the second highest-streamed English show on the site. Actor Catherine Zeta-Jones, who plays matriarch Morticia Addams, shared her love for Hopkins’s impression of the severed hand. The video showed his hand, covered in stitch makeup to replicate the Thing, ‘walking’ over a model of some sort, with The Addams Family’s original theme song playing in the background.
The actor then showed off his piano skills in character, playing a swift tune before waving goodbye. Hopkins captioned the post with, “Happy Wednesday THING happens when an actor has free time on his hands”. Zeta-Jones, who starred alongside Hopkins in The Mask of Zorro, commented: “Haha. I love you so Tony.”
The Thing has been a member of The Addams Family since 1954 when he first appeared in Charles Addams’ comic strip, first created in 1938. The severed hand was originally portrayed by Ted Cassidy, the 6-foot-9-inch actor who also played the massive butler Lurch in the original 1964 Addams Family show.
In Netflix’s version of the Addams family in Wednesday, Thing is played by professional magician Victor Dorobantu. The Netflix behind-the-scenes video revealed Dorobantu had never acted before the show
Visual effects supervisor Tom Turnbull shared: “He’s never been an actor. So we brought him in, and we started doing rehearsals with him to see what he could do and to show him what worked with a walk and what didn’t work with a walk, and that first scene he really kinda nailed”.
Hopkins will also give another terrific The Son, directed by Florian Zeller, and has already stirred talk in the Academy. The film is due for release on Friday, January 20th, 2023.
Check out Hopkins’s performance below.