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In November, the biggest celebrity memoir of the year will be published. We Did OK, Kid promises to tell the life story of Sir Anthony Hopkins, and anyone with even a passing knowledge of the man will know that it’s a hell of a story. Born working class, he was hauled out of repertory theatre after being spotted by Sir Laurence Olivier, a move that set him on a course to the stars. Sir Richard Attenborough called him “unquestionably the greatest actor of his generation”. He has battled depression and alcoholism. He can do a mean Tommy Cooper impersonation. His publisher promises that Anthony Hopkins will tell this story with “a voice that is both arresting and vulnerable”.
That is, unless you listen to it on audiobook. Because Kenneth Branagh’s doing that bit.
On Tuesday, Variety reported that Branagh – not Hopkins – will read the audiobook version of We Did OK, Kid. In statements, Branagh said that “Anthony Hopkins’s memoir is searingly honest. His astonishing personal journey and professional triumphs are shared with rare insight and emotion. It was a privilege to speak the inspiring words of a humble man and a genuine master.” Which isn’t to say that the voice of Hopkins will be entirely absent from the recording since, according to Variety, when the book is finished Hopkins will read “over a dozen of his favourite poems in his instantly recognisable Welsh cadence”.
Which is something. But this news may well stir complicated feelings in potential readers. On one hand, Kenneth Branagh is an extremely high class choice for an audiobook narrator. Before you’ve even heard it, you can imagine the power, the subtlety of tone, that he’ll be able to bring to Hopkins’s story. It’s a testament to their friendship – a friendship that helped convince Hopkins to star in Thor – that Branagh agreed to do this.
What’s more, Hopkins is 87 years old. The thought of spending a couple of days in an airless recording studio drily reading back his own words, wincing over sentences that it’s far too late to correct, is a galling prospect for anyone, but someone pushing 90 should be forgiven for wanting to spend their days doing something less laborious.
Plus, for the bulk of authors, it doesn’t really matter who does the audiobook. For example, I haven’t narrated a single one of my audiobooks. Katie Leung from the Harry Potter films did one of my kids’ books, and another – a fairly personal book about my experience of hair loss – was read by a professional recording artist called Graham Mack, who has a full head of hair. In both cases, they did a much better job than I could have done.
However, the reason they did better than me is because I am not the greatest actor of my generation Sir Anthony Hopkins. If I was the greatest actor of my generation Sir Anthony Hopkins, I would have smashed those audiobooks out of the bloody park. Listeners would have heard the depths of my sincerity and the weight of my gravitas as I growled out the tragic tale of a funny elephant.
And this, I suspect, is what listeners of We Did OK, Kid will probably want. Not just the story of Anthony Hopkins told by Anthony Hopkins, but the sound of Anthony Hopkins at full tilt; wringing out every drop of nuance and emotion that might have been missed had they simply chosen to read it in their heads.
That said, those who do read the book themselves may well find themselves doing it in Anthony Hopkins’s voice, since it’s so recognisable and distinct. Which begs the question; is Kenneth Branagh going to do the voice? As anyone who has seen Tenet or his Poirot films can attest, the man knows his way around an accent. Might it be the case that he decides to read We Did OK, Kid in an exaggerated Welsh accent to make up for the absence of the author? In reality, the chances of this are slim. But wouldn’t it be amazing?
Either way, this is likely to be one of the last times you will hear of an issue like this. We live in an age where everybody from Michael Parkinson to Agatha Christie is being pulled back from the dead, their voices reanimated by AI. Had Hopkins chosen to publish We Did OK, Kid a year or two from now, it isn’t impossible to imagine that the audiobook would have been read aloud by an uncanny AI approximation of his own voice. Compared with that, Branagh will do just fine.
