Transcript of 'The Interview': Anthony Hopkins on Quitting Drinking and Finding God

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From the New York Times, this is the interview. I'm David Markezi. In so many of Sir Anthony Hopkins's greatest performances, he's able to suggest captivating hidden depths to his characters. That's true whether he's playing a murderer like Hannibal Lector or a kindly doctor like he did in The Elephant Man. There's always a sense that these men are thinking and feeling things that for whatever reason, they're keeping to themselves. The same can no longer be said for Hopkins. In his new autobiography, We Did Okay, Kid, the 87-year-old shares the details of his rough youth in Wales, his painful estrangement from his only child, a daughter from his first marriage, and his rise to Hollywood success. The book also reveals a man who isn't content to merely recount what happened and when. He's also given a lot of thought to the big questions, the why of it all and what it all means. And yet, even at this late stage, he remains mystified by the sheer luck and improbability of his unlikely life. Here's my conversation with Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Hello, David. Tony Hopkins.

I was wondering, do I go Sir Anthony?

No, no, no.

Tony. Nice to meet you.

Good to meet you.

I thought it might be interesting to start with a key epiphany that you write about in the book. We all have our turning points in our lives. Would you have such a specific one and know exactly when it happened, a moment that changed everything for you? Can you tell me about what happened on December 29th, 1975, at 11: 00?

Well, it's almost 50 years ago. I'm always slightly reluctant to talk about it because I don't want to sound preachy. But I was drunk, driving driving my car here in California in a blackout, 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, I know. I realized that 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. So I made the fatal phone call to an intergroup in LA, 12-Step program. So we'll send somebody over to meet you. I said, No, I'll come to you. So we went to this intergroup office. It was 11: 00 precisely. Looked at my watch. And this is the spooky part. Some deep, powerful thought or voice spoke to me from inside and said, 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.

And it was just a voice from the blue?

From inside, deep inside me. But it was vocal, male, reasonable, like a radio voice. The craving to drink was taken from me or left. I don't know if there are 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. Should I give you another epiphany?

Yeah.

I'll go back to 1955 Easter. My school report had arrived, the dreaded school report. I was 17, and I was dreading this day because my parents would read these terrible reports on my progress in school because I was a dummy. So I was known as Dennis the Dunce. Couldn't understand anything was going on. Resentful, lonely, and all that. I remember my father opening the report, the dreaded moment, about five o'clock in the evening. We were going to go out to see a film, I remember. Beautiful Spring Day. He opened the report and it said, Anthony is way below the standard of the school, which is a death now, really. My father said, I don't know what's going to happen to you. I don't know. But he was worried because, and quite reasonably, he'd spent a bit of money to give me an education, and I wasn't capable of meeting that standard. I couldn't understand anything. My brain was cut off. But I remember taking a slight move away. He said, One day I'll show you. My father looked at me, he said, Well, I hope you do. At that moment, what I decided was to stop playing the game of being stupid and a dummy.

But we step into circles of energy which are negative, and we play a role because it's easy to say, Well, it's not meant for me. Well, there's a truth in it. But at the same time, you have to say, Wake up and live. Act as if it is impossible to fail. And that's what I did.

You grew up the son of a baker, working class in Wales, and I can't imagine that you knew that many artists or actors. Was the idea of becoming an actor something that you or your family had ambivalence about?

No. I think as a 17-year-old boy who didn't know anything, really, something sparked me, and I got a scholarship to an acting school in South Wales. I'd never acted in my life, but I did an audition, and they gave me a scholarship. How? I don't know. I remember this is another thing. I remember going to see a play with the great Peter O'Tull at the Bristol Old Vic. He was playing Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger. And onto the stage came this lightning bolt, Peter O'Tull, very dangerous actor. And I thought, God, if he stepped off the stage, he'd come and kill us all. And 10 years later, I was in the theater, the National Theater, playing André and Laurence Olivia's Production of Three Sisters by Chekow. Knock on the door at the end of the evening, we should be that Peter O'Tull. Now, that's weird. And he said, I want you to do a film test for me. It's a film with Catherine Hepburn called The Lion in Winter.

Yeah, it was your first film. Yeah.

So I showed up and did the test. He said, Right, you've got it. You've got the part. And he'd had a few to drink, and we had a few to drink after that. Now, that's beyond explanation to me. When I look at that film, which I do occasionally, I think, How on earth did that happen? Why me? I don't know to this day why. I am what I am, and I do what I do because I love doing it. It's all in the game. Wonderful game called Life. No sweat, no big deal. There are no big deals.

The idea that essentially life is a game. There are no big deals. We don't need to take anything so seriously. You just got to do the best you can. That's in a way, a recurring theme in your book. I wonder, if we believe that we shouldn't take anything too seriously, what should we take seriously? What does matter in life?

Well, I don't mean to be responsibly indifferent to everything. There are difficulties. There are monstrous difficulties in life. Yeah, you take notice of them. But finally, I think now, approaching 88 years of age, I wake up in the morning thinking, I'm still here. How? I don't know. But what about keeping me, I think, Thank you very much, much obliged. Beyond my finite self, there's not much I can do. I had a gift when I was a boy. I could suddenly learn lots of words, of speeches from Shakespeare, poems and all that. Now at this age, I look at those poems that I wrote down, or they bring back clear memories of my childhood, and I get very moved by it. I just have to think of them. I get tearful, not through sadness, but through the wonder of having been alive, having lived those years and my clear memories of Wales, my clear memories of my parents, their struggles and hardships after the war years. They really struggled to make a living and to give me an education I look back with tremendous gratitude and I get weepy because I remember the glory of being a child.

I had a good childhood. I wasn't bright in school. I was hopeless and I was bullied a lot. I was slapped around. But I look back and I think, well, that's part of growing up. I wasn't bright. And in those days, teachers could knock you about. I remember being slapped across the head by a teacher several times. Because I didn't know something. And what I would do, revert to it be called in the army dumb insolence. I wouldn't respond. I just withdraw into myself. And I'd stare at them blankly, and it drove them nuts, and they're all dead now.

You won.

I won.

When you were a kid and you would hear your father or teachers say you were a dummy, I'm sure that the voice, your voice in your own head when you were younger also said, I'm a dummy.

That's right.

I think people are often in their lives, and certainly true for me, we do battle with this voice in our head that tells us we can't do things or we're stupid or whatever it may be. How did you quiet that voice or learn to control it?

Well, it's still there in me from childhood, but what you do, it now whispers. So when I say, Shut up, Yeah, I just... Yeah. Thanks a lot. We all have problems. We've all got limitations. But I do believe that if you say, Wake up and live, act as if it as an impossible thing, we actually tap into a power that's in ourselves, which helps us to do, well, not everything, but some things. I discovered that I could compose music. I discovered that I could write. I discovered through my my lovely wife, Stella, that I could paint. I remember she was an example because she changed my life. She found some drawings in some old scripts of mine. Just after we got married, she said, These drawings, you did these? I said, Yeah, you got to paint. I said, I can't paint. She said, Of course you can. Just do it. So I then bought some canvases and acrylic paints and pens and inks, and I just do it.

After When I've talked with actors, they've suggested that something about acting and something about their affinity for acting or gift for acting has to do with the way that acting fulfills something for them. Is there anything that you find acting fulfills for you, some inner need?

A need would sound rather sad. I just enjoy it. I enjoy the scientific the fun of it, of learning a script or learning all the lines. I'm very good at that. I learn everything there is to about the text that I'm studying because that reforms something in me. I suppose on a deep psychological level, I'm trying to escape from what I was. I don't know.

What were you? What is the thing you were trying to escape from?

Well, that lonely kid. Actually, the vain surprise of saying, I did it. I survived my loneliness. I survived those bullies. Not that I blame them, God bless them all, even the teachers who beat me about. I mean, I'm not a victim. If people choose to wallow in there, well, okay, go ahead, but you're going to die. And that's why I drank, to nullify that discomfort of whatever it was in me because it made me feel big. Booze is terrific because it makes you instantly feel in a different space. And I enjoyed that. I didn't do it that long. I did it for 15 years. But I remember, I think this is the life. And all actors in those days, Pizotoul, Richard Burton, all of them, and they know them. I remember those drinking sessions, think this is the life We're rebels. We're outsiders. We can celebrate. And at the back of the mind is, And it'll kill you as well. And I remember thinking, this is going to kill me. The drinking. Yeah, because I was drinking like it was going out of fashion. And those guys who worked with it were all gone. And they were very talented people.

Wonderful. But once you get into that schizophrenia stage, when your personality becomes rabid And from the moment you're a jolly nice guy in the bar, and suddenly you turn, viciously, say, You talk to me. That's what was happening to me.

You write about how you were influenced by older actors like Laurence Olivier or Katherine Hepburn helped you understand about film acting. But I was curious about whether any of the younger actors that you've worked with over the years, people like Nicole Kidman or Brad Pitt or Ryan Gosling, have they taught you anything about acting or shown you anything about the craft?

No, it's always been a pleasure to work with them. I mean, Brad and everyone you've just mentioned. Nothing but praise for them. I was working with a young actor a few years ago, young Canadian actor who looked a bit like James Dean. I think he thought he was James Dean. But we were doing a scene together. See you, mom, boy. I said, Can't hear a word you're saying? I can't hear you. Why are you mumbling? I didn't want to spoil his day. But I said, If you do that, you see, we'll go to the pub next door because you're supposed to tell the story. Speak up. Be clear. Wandering on like a Backstreet Marlin Brown is not going to help you at all in your career. Never heard him since.

In reading the book and in reading older interviews with you or older articles about you. To me, there's a consistent sense that comes from you that acting shouldn't really be taken that seriously. The actors are entertainers And I wonder, do you think acting has any greater claim on the truth? No.

It's an entertainment. Maybe it's an educational way of entertaining.

So it has no deeper importance.

I'm not dismissing it, but I'm just saying, if I start taking myself too seriously, I just think it's only a job. It's only acting. So for me, they're just pastiches, little dabs of paint in one's life. And not to be taken, because at the moment when you get to a certain age in life, you're going through, you got ambitions, you got great dreams, and everything's fine. And there on the distant hill is death. And you think, Well, now is the time to wake up and live and really enjoy it.

Do you feel like you achieved your dreams?

Oh, yeah. I I didn't know if they were a dream. They just happened to me because I can't take credit for them at all. I cannot. I mean, my life is a mystery to me. I'm not trying to sound ultra-modest or humble, but I have to confess that I don't understand how it all happened. The miracle is, look at my hands. My hands are in 87-year-old man's hands. I'm slowing down and my body's creaky, although I'm still strong. But the miracle of it is I'm still here. And that's not a mathematical formula. That's a miracle of life that's in us all. The heart that still beats. I look at my cat. I watch him sleeping. I watch him out for the count, and I look at the miracle of his life. A little cat. The miracle, the sheer miracle. To dismiss it as a sacrilege.

What snaps you out of the miracle?

My bad back.

That'll do it.

Yeah, but it's not even that bad. I get a bit of treatment, a lower back, a bit of stiffness. And what I do now is slow down. I take everything very slowly because I'm strong, my legs are strong, I work out. But what I do is I take easy because one trip, one fall can kill you.

I mean, your age is a fact. It's undeniable. But it doesn't really seem from afar as if your productivity has slowed down. You work a lot. Do you know what to do with yourself when you're not working?

I play the piano, read.

But why do you work so much is my real question.

They still often make me work. I don't know what's in their minds. They may think I'm 40. I don't know. They give me these jobs to do, and I think, okay. And I think, well, if they're game to employ me. I hope I just show up fit and well and ready. But what do you say yes to?

Do you just say yes to everything?

Anything I can. Well, why not? No, I say yes. As long as it's a good script, not too far fetched, as long as the writing is good and the director's amenable, yeah, why not?

How often these days do you get a director who's not amenable?

Oh, they're all amenable now.

Is that a change?

Well, I used to in the past have a few problems with... Those days, there were tyrant directors, tyrannical bullies. Few of those, but when I used to confront them, I would confront them in no uncertain terms. I'd say things like, You talk to me like that, and you'll wake up with a crowd around you. Whether I meant it or not, I don't know, but I wouldn't put up with it. I said, Don't talk to me like that. I said, No, you shut up. And either they would or they wouldn't. I remember working with a director who was giving notes to a young woman, fine actress, and he started shouting at her. I said, Hold it. You raise your voice one decible to this lady, and I'm going. And you, my dear, should leave as well. She said, Thank you. I said, How long has he been doing that? She said, From the whole film, I said, You should have told me. I can't even remember exactly. I think he's gone now. But no, I defend people. Don't raise your voice. It's a film. It's a stupid film. That's all it is. It's not important. Doing take after take after take after take.

Who cares?

Do you feel that any of the films that you've made, would you call them important?

No.

Not one? No. The Elephant Man. Give me The Elephant Man.

Yeah, it was a good film.

The Remains of the Day.

Yeah, they were good, but- Silence of the Lambs. But the thing is, about all that stuff. People ask me about Silence of the Lambs. How did you do that? I said, Well, I am not Hannibal Lector. I am not a butler. I am not this, and I'm not that. I'm just a mechanic. I show up, someone says, How did you play the Remains of the Day? That butler, how did you play him? I said, Well, I was very quiet, very still, and walked about quietly.

That's it? It's that easy?

Yeah. But how did you play Hannibal Lector? Well, I played the opposite of what they promised. Oh, he's a monster. Good morning. You're not real FBI, are you?

It gives me the heebie-jeebies. Don't do that.

Because you'd play the opposite, and it's easy.

I'd like to return to the material from the book for a second. And the specific material I'd like to focus on, I know it's sensitive for you.

I know what you're going to talk about my domestic life. Yes. No.

Even though it's in the book?

No, it's done.

Can I ask a general question that's not specifically about the material in the book? No. But it's I'll stumble through this. Part of the reason that the material in the book about your relationship with your daughter, your strange relationship with your daughter, part of the reason why I found it so painful is that it resonated with me for personal reasons. I've seen my father, I think, twice in 20 years. I've spoken to him once in those 20 years. I'm very curious about other people's experience of that estrangement. In this instance, the estrangement is my choice, but I just wonder if you have thoughts about where reconciliation might lie between estranged parents and children.

My wife, Stella, sent an invitation to come and see us. Not a word. Of response. So I think, okay, fine. I wish her well, but I'm not going to waste blood over that. If you want to waste your life being in resentment 50 years later, 58 years later, fine, go ahead. It's not in my can. You see, I could carry resentment over the past, this and the other. But that's death. You're not living. You have to acknowledge one thing, that we are imperfect. We're not saints. We're all sinners and saints or whatever we are. We do the best we can. Life is painful. Sometimes people get hurt, sometimes we get hurt. But you can't live like that. You have to say, get over it. And if you can't get over it, fine. Good luck to you. But I have no judgment. But you did what I could. So that's it. And that's all I want to say.

Do you hope your daughter reads the book?

I'm not going to answer that, no. I don't care.

I'll move on.

Please, I want you to. Because I don't want to hurt her.

I understand.

I don't want to I don't want to make any... No. 20 years the offer was made, but fine. Onwards.

Towards the end of the book, you talk about a couple labels that might apply to you, one of which is Asperger's. I think you say in there that your wife, Stella, suspects that you may have Asperger's. Have you ever been diagnosed? No.

I'm told I have all the symptoms. I don't know what any of it means. If it means if I have it, then I'm happy. I don't know.

But the other label, it's right in the same paragraph. You say another label that might apply is the label cold fish. You say that you prefer the Cold Fish label to the Asperger's label. Why is that? Why does that feel more fitting or more comfortable to you?

Well, it's only a turn of phrase, a cold fish. I'm not a cold fish. I have lots of feelings bundled up with them. They're deep inside me. When I read something from the past, I get tearful. I don't get attached to sentimentality. In this business with actors who admire and I've worked with, I form no attachment. I respect them, but I form... Well, the coalfish is I am remote. I am a loner, and I've never been able to shake that. I have acquaintances, friends, if you want to call it that. I don't have any close friends. I'm a little distant, a little suspicious, I suppose. I'm comfortable just chuntering the wrong through my my slightly isolated life. But I'm not a recluse. I don't live in a tower. I live in a house here, and I'm traveling a lot. I have my immediate family, my niece Tara, and my lovely wife, Stella, and they boss me about it. They tell me what to do, and I'm happy with that.

The personal remoteness you described, I was wondering how that might actually benefit your performances sometimes. Because when I think of some of my favorite performances that you've given, I'm thinking of things like Remains of the Day or 84 Charing Cross Road, The Father, even on some level, Silence of the Lambs or Shadow Lance has this, too. I feel like there is an emotional remoteness to some of those characters. I wonder if that's something that is just a fingerprint, maybe, or a signature of a good Anthony Hopkins performance, or is that an intentional performing strategy?

I think it's partially intentional because many years ago, there were two teachers at the Royal Academy. They were brief visitors there. They did not appreciate the academy, the academic system, but they were teachers of the Stanislavski system, let's say. And I remember this one teacher called Yatt Malmgrin, and he was a dance teacher. He's Swedish. And I used to go to these painful classes of movement. I hated them. And I'm built like a Welsh rugby Scrum, a bit beefy. And Yad said, Anthony said, you have too much extroverted motoric energy and you will become insensitive. I didn't know what he was talking about, but I gathered instinctively to develop the other side, which was to pull back, be in the darkness, be in the shade called remote. And it's the remote that paid off for me because I had to change my whole psychology to not be that rumbunctuous rugby player coming on the stage, bumping into people, being ferocious. Gradually, I learned, no, no, pull back, pull back. There's one acting note that was Gloria Graham, a great movie star. She was doing a film with Bogart, called In a lonely place. And Bogart said to her, Stay in the shade.

Don't go to the camera. Let it come to you. He saw something in her because she was a little crazy. He said, Let it come to you. I think he had that quality as well. And that's the more magnetic side.

It compels you to watch.

Well, because you're not doing anything. When Chilton says to Clarice Starling, What's he like? You mean Hannibal the cannibal? Chilton, the head of the asylum, says, Oh, he's a monster. She goes down the passway to the cell, maybe expecting to see a blubbering lunatic. And Jonathan Demmish said to me, he said, How do you want to be seen by Clarice? Do you want to be lying on the bank or do you want to be reading? I said, No, I want to be standing. Why? I said, I can smell her coming down the corridor. When she sees me, there's this still perfectly civil gentleman. Good morning. You're not real FBI, are you? All the way to the FBI. That's the way to build a portrait. And it's all remote because lector is the remote spellbinding character. And if you have remoteness as the centrifugal force in you, that's the driving force that pulls you in.

There's another epiphany that I'd like to go back to, if you don't mind. This is another one you describe in the book. You were driving in Los Angeles in, I think, the late '70s, and you felt a pull to go over to a Catholic church, and you went inside, and you told a young priest there that you had found God. Now, I get the sense that you're not going to church every Sunday or praying in a conventional way. What is God to you?

Well, it's a touchy subject, isn't it? Because I'm religion. But what happened that morning when that voice said, It's over. Now you can start living. And it has all been for a purpose. So don't forget one moment of it. I knew that was a power way beyond my understanding. Not that there in the clouds, but here, in here. So I chose to call it at that moment God. I didn't know what else to call it. Short, well, God, easy to spell. And I recently wrote piece of music which was conducted in Riyadh, Goodbye, a piano and orchestra. At the end, it came to me as I was writing it, as I was composing it, That that's it. We come full circle. We dip down to, That's all, folks. And that it was all a dream anyway. Everything is a dream, and it's goodbye before death takes us.

If you're getting nearer to the big goodbye, do you take any pride or draw any meaning or take any solace from what you leave behind both as a person and as an artist?

Or you mean a heritage?

A legacy.

A legacy? I'd never think about it. I never think about it. When they cover the earth over That's it. We move on. I remember going to... I was asked by the widow of Lawrence Olivia, Jung Plarate, if I would read the last Lines of King Leah at the Cascet in this little church in Sussex. I was astounded that I was asked to do it. There was Olivia's Cascet, full of the flowers and reeds and collections of flowers from Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. And after that, we got into our cars and we went to the crematorium and I was sitting next to Maggie Smith, the great actress Maggie Smith, I didn't know her that well, but we were sitting next to each other and we both worked with Olivia. And there was the casket. And finally, as the curtains went... You could hear the rollers taking them into the crematorium, the flames. Maggie Smith said, What a final curtain. And you think, God Almighty, what is it all about? The wonder of all that energy that had gone into his life or anyone's life, not just a celebrity, but anyone's life. The energy that goes into survival.

Seeing my own father dying, going to the hospital the night he died. And standing at the foot of his bed, my mother smoothing his hair. I felt his feet at the foot of the bed. They were dead cold. He'd gone. And as I stood there, that silent night in that empty-sounding hospital in South Wales, a voice again came to me, You're not so hot either. This is what will happen to you. And it's a great wake-up call when you know that.

It's a fairly brusque voice. You're It's not so hot.

But what it is, it's an awakening. Several makenings and epiphanies. We think, Yeah, that's right.

But, Sir Anthony, I realize I'm dancing around a question that I would like your answer to. Do you think your life has had meaning?

The only meaning I can put to it is that everything I sought and yearned for found me. I didn't find it. It came to me.

After the break, a poetry reading by Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Hi, this is Ashley. I live in San Francisco with my My friend. We would love to officially share my New York Times subscription with separate logins. We both love cooking, love being in the kitchen, but I'm a 30-minute and under efficient dinner girly. I want a sheet pan meal. He is very elaborate. He wants to get into the storytelling. I want to be able to save my easy meals and check off the ones that I've completed. I think him having his own profile would be great.

Ashley, we heard you. Introducing the New York Times family subscription. You your own login, and Mr. Elaborate gets his. Plus, room for two others. Find out more at nytimes. Com/family. Hi, Tony.

Hello. Is that David?

It is David. How are you? Hello. Good. Good. I, of course, saw that at the end of your book, there's an appendix that includes a handful of poems, which is something I'd never seen done in an autobiography before. Can you tell me why you decided to include those poems?

When I was a kid, I learned a lot of poems, a lot of words, and I was very moved by them from, I think from about the age of 11. There was one occasion. I was in school. I was sitting in the back of the classroom where I always sat, suddenly. No not wanting to be involved in anything. The English teacher called me, said, I'll come up here to the front of the class. I thought, What for? He said, I wanted you to read this poem. He seemed to have an instinct about me that I knew something. And he handed me a poem, which was West Wing by John Macefield. He said, Read that. He said, Out loud. I read it and I was strangely moved by it. I read At the end, he said, That's it. Okay, good. Thank you. It's very good. So it was my first good review, I think. And I think that's what it is. It's an expression in my life. I read poems and I get... Yeah, I get moved by them, and I don't know why. I think it's to do with my age and how poetry digs really deep inside us beyond our understanding.

Would you be willing to read The West Wind by John Macefield? That is one of the poems that you included in the appendix.

Let me just find that. Have I got a minute? Yeah. Hold on a second. It's a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds cries. I never hear the west wind, but tears are in my eyes. For it comes from the westlands, the old brown hills, and aprils in the west wind, and daffodils. It's a fine land, the westland, for hearts as tired as mine. Apple orchids blossom there, the air's like wine. There is cool green grass there where men may lie at rest, and the thrushes are in song there, fluting in the nest. Will you not come home, brother? You've been long away. It's April and blossom time, and white is the may, and bright is the sun, brother, and warm is the rain. Will you not come home, brother? Home to us again? The young corn is green, brother, where the rabbits run, its blue sky and white clouds, and warm rain and sun. It's song to a man's soul, brother, fire to man's brain, to hear the wild bees and see the merry spring again. Larks are singing in the West, brother, above the green wheat. Will you not come home, brother, and rest your tired feet?

I've a bomb for bruised hearts, brother, sleep for aching eyes, says the warm wind, the west wind, full of birds cries. It's the white road westward is the road I must tread, to the green grass, the cool grass, the rest of a heart and head, to the violets and the warm hearts, and the thrush's song, in the fine land, the Westland, the land where I belong.

I'd like to end on that eloquent grace note. Sir Anthony Hopkins, thank you very much. Thank you. That's Sir Anthony Hopkins. His memoir, We Did Okay, Kid, will be published on November fourth. To watch this interview and many others, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube. Com/@symboltheinterviewpodcast. This conversation was produced by Seth Kelly. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon, mixing by Sonia Herero and Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Diane Wong, and Marion Lozano. Photography by Devon Yalkin. Our senior Booker is Priya Matthew, and Wyatt Orm is our producer. Our executive producer is Allison Benedict. Video of this interview was produced by Paula Newdorff. Cinematography by Nicholas Kraus and Zebediah Smith, with additional camera work by Ricardo Mejia and Jackson Montemair. Audio by Tim Brown III. It was edited by Amy Moreno and Caroline Kim. Brooklyn Minters is the executive producer of podcast video. Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Ronan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddie Macielo, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnik. Next week, Lulu talks to Jennifer Lawrence about how becoming a mother influenced her performance in her new movie, Die My Love.

My experience with my second was I just felt like a tiger was chasing me every day. I've had so much anxiety. I had a nonstop intrusive thought that I was just at the whim of. It controlled me.

I'm David Markezi, and this is the interview from the New York Times.