22 February 2022 Fact checks

No evidence Sir Anthony Hopkins penned essay about personal relationships

By Abbas Panjwani • 1 min

What was claimed

Sir Anthony Hopkins is the author of a short essay on personal relationships.

Our verdict

There is no evidence for this. Similar words predating the first instance of the essay being attributed to Sir Anthony have been attributed to another author.

A short essay reflecting on friendship, love and commitment has been posted on Facebook and attributed to the actor Sir Anthony Hopkins.

The words were in all likelihood not penned by Sir Anthony. 

Similar quotes have been attributed to Brianna Wiest, an author who wrote an essay titled “Next Year, Let Go Of The People Who Aren’t Ready To Love You” in 2018. 

Many of the sentences in the Facebook post are slightly different to those in that essay—for example, “stop showing up for people who have no interest in your presence” instead of “stop showing up for people who are indifferent about your presence”—but the overall structure is very similar. 

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As reported by Snopes, extracts from this essay, verbatim or paraphrased, started to be attributed to Sir Anthony in 2020.

Image courtesy of Tony Shek

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This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there is no evidence Sir Anthony Hopkins wrote this essay.