What young CGI Anthony Hopkins on “Westworld” looks like compared to young IRL Anthony Hopkins

If there was one thing that really jarred you about Westworld’s third epsisode, “The Stray,” last night (and let’s be real, just about everything on the show is OMG-worthy), it was probably the appearence of a ~young~ Anthony Hopkins. Really, it was the appearance of a young Dr. Robert Ford in a flashback to the “early years” when he was still a budding robotics creator. Ford relayed an important backstory to Bernard about his then partner Arnold no-last-name-given (yet) and his struggles with the “bicameral mind” – which involves a lot very real and somewhat complicated theoretical brain stuff we won’t be going into here.

And here’s what young Dr. Ford looked like back then.

We literally screamed, “whoaaaaaaa” when we saw this. It’s some pretty impressive CGI, to the point where we were creeped out in the best of ways possible. Of course, this made us super curious to know what young CGI Anthony Hopkins looks like compared to a real life young Anthony Hopkins, so here we go.

Here’s Dr. Ford as a young  man compared to what Anthony Hopkins looked like as a young man.

Impressive, right? The image on the right is from Anthony’s 1978 film Magic. Since it looks like this is roughly the Hopkins-era the visual effects artists were basing young Ford’s look on, this makes us pretty much jump to the conclusion that the flashback events happening in Westworld last night also took place roughly that long ago, too (almost 40 years). So, does this mean that it was about 10 years after the events in the flashback when the park’s first ~incident~ happened, i.e. Arnold’s death? Is this the “critical failure” that was referenced in Episode 1, “The Original?”

It’s been over 30 years since that “critical failure,” so…

We’re hoping we get the answer soon, but either way, we’re loving the depths that Westworld keeps diving into, and if eerie-awesome CGI Anthony Hopkins is just the tip of the iceberg, we can’t wait to see what else lies in store for HBO’s latest hit show.