Tom Felton remembers “awful” audition with Anthony Hopkins

Tom Felton has opened up about an “awful” audition alongside Anthony Hopkins for Hitchcock.

The Harry Potter actor recalled auditioning for the 2012 film in which Hopkins played the late filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, calling the experience “awful”.

“This was not my finest hour when it came to auditioning,” Felton said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.

“I got the sides very last minute. I knew I wasn’t right for the role. I’ve never seen Psycho – the film was about the making of Psycho – I didn’t know anything particularly well, but I knew I wasn’t right for this.”

He continued: “I’ve very rarely called my agent before going into an audition and said, ‘I really don’t think this is for me,’ but I did on that occasion.

“They said, ‘Just go in as you always do. Just show your face, show you know the work, and trot on.’”

Felton went on to say that “[Hopkins] decided to go off book. He was like, ‘Let’s put the scene down. Let’s just test the water with the characters. And I proceeded to probably babble out the worst three minutes of improv in an awful American accent that anyone has ever seen.

“He had a very graceful way of saying leave, which was, ‘Thanks very much for your time,’” Felton said. “I sheepishly tucked my tail and walked out of that one.”

In Felton’s newly released book Beyond The Wand: The Magic And Mayhem Of Growing Up A Wizard, the actor opened up about his past struggles with alcohol abuse.

“Drinking becomes a habit at the best of times,” he wrote. “When you’re drinking to escape a situation, even more so. The habit spilled out of the bar and, from time to time, on to set.

“It came to the point where I would think nothing of having a drink while I was working. I’d turn up unprepared, not the professional I wanted to be. The alcohol, though, wasn’t the problem. It was the symptom.”

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