Director Michael Bay has taken his share of knocks over the years, particularly when it comes to his highly lucrative yet critically drubbed Transformers series. But the filmmaker has one member of acting royalty squarely in his corner: Anthony Hopkins, who has joined the blockbuster movie franchise for its fifth go-around, Transformers: The Last Knight.

“I thought, ‘This guy’s a genius, he really is,‘” Hopkins told Yahoo Movies (watch above) last week at CinemaCon about his impression of Bay after meeting the director over breakfast to discuss the project. “He’s the same ilk as Oliver Stone and [Steven] Spielberg and [Martin] Scorsese. Brilliance. Savants, really, they are. He’s a savant.”

In Last Knight, Hopkins, 79, stars opposite the returning Mark Wahlberg as Sir Edmund Burton, an astronomer and historian who lives with Autobots on a sprawling British countryside estate.

The Oscar-winning Silence of the Lambs and Westworld actor said he had seen the first two movies in the franchise (2007’s Transformers and 2009’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) prior to the Last Knight opportunity coming along, and then caught up with Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) and Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) to get up to speed.

“[They are] terrific,” Hopkins said. “They’re created by a genius.”

Transformers: The Last Knight opens June 23.

Watch Michael Bay admit he gets sad thinking The Last Knight will be the last Transformers movie he directs:





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