Anthony Hopkins calls mental health labels ‘nonsense,’ dismisses autism diagnosis from his wife

While Anthony Hopkins reflected on his sobriety journey, he also realized his own mental health issues may have stemmed from his father, who was also a big drinker.  

Hopkins, 87, confessed to The Sunday Times that as his “father’s son,” it crossed his mind that “there was something not right” with his own mind. 

It was famed British actor Laurence Olivier who encouraged Hopkins to pursue mental health therapy and see a psychiatrist. Hopkins admitted he “briefly” saw a therapist, but wasn’t too fond of the process.

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“He kept saying, ‘Let’s go back,’ Hopkins recalled. “And I’d just go, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ So boring.”

Once Hopkins discovered the therapist had been married three times, he finalized his decision and quit therapy. “Oh,” Hopkins allegedly told the therapist, “all is well with you.”

His own third wife, Stella Arroyave, believes Hopkins is autistic.

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“I’m obsessed with numbers. I’m obsessed with detail,” Hopkins said. “I like everything in order. And memorizing. Stella looked it up and she said, ‘You must be Asperger’s.’ I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. I don’t even believe it.”

When Hopkins was educated about the benefit of a neurodivergence diagnosis even later in life, the Oscar-winning actor admitted he’s still hesitant to believe in labels.

“Well, I guess I’m cynical because it’s all nonsense. It’s all rubbish,” Hopkins said. “ADHD, OCD, Asperger’s, blah, blah, blah. Oh God, it’s called living. It’s just being a human being, full of tangled webs and mysteries and stuff that’s in us. Full of warts and grime and craziness, it’s the human condition.”

He added, “All these labels. I mean, who cares? But now it’s fashion.”

“Oh, give me a break,” Hopkins said before offering a different perspective into his psyche. 

“I think maybe it’s some kind of embarrassment that I’m an actor,” Hopkins admitted. “‘What d’you do?’ ‘I act.’ No, I’ve not done a stroke of work in my life. When I look at my life, the reality is I haven’t had a good, decent job in my entire life.” 

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He continued, “I’ve done nothing except show up, speak the lines and go home. People out there are digging the streets and working in shops and stores. That is real work. I haven’t dug a street out. I’ve done nothing. I look at [myself] and think, ‘I haven’t done a day’s work in my life.’ That’s the reality.”

Ahead of his 50-year sobriety anniversary, the “Silence of the Lambs” star recalled the moment he realized he was an alcoholic as he drove drunk in California with “no clue where I was going.”

“It was a moment when I realized that I could have killed somebody – or myself, which I didn’t care about, but I could have killed a family in a car,” Hopkins told “The Interview.” 

“I realized I was an alcoholic. I came to my senses and I said to an ex-agent of mine at this party in Beverly Hills, I said, ‘I need help.’”

He added, “I made the fatal phone call to an intergroup in LA, a 12-step program. They said, ‘We’ll send somebody over to meet you,’ and I said, ‘No, I’ll come to you.'”

When Hopkins arrived at the meeting, he heard a “deep, powerful thought” that told him, “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.”

Almost instantly, Hopkins said, his craving for drinking just left. 

“I don’t know or have any theories except divinity, or that power that we all possess inside us that creates us from birth – life force – whatever it is. It’s a consciousness, I believe. That’s all I know. My whole life has been like that,” he said.

Hopkins admitted he drank “to nullify that discomfort, or whatever it was in me, because it made me feel big. You know booze is terrific because it instantly feels in a different space and I enjoyed that.”

Before getting sober, he recalled thinking to himself, “This is going to kill me… I was drinking like it was going out of fashion.”