Catherine Zeta-Jones Joins Anthony Hopkins in A Visit To Grandpa's
Catherine Zeta-Jones has joined anthony hopkins in A Visit To Grandpa's, a new film based on a Dylan Thomas short story, as production gets underway in Wales this month. The casting adds another Welsh name to a project built around one of the country’s best-known writers and a story first published in 1938.
Sir Anthony said, "This is a powerful and profoundly beautiful story, one that allows me to return to my Welsh roots while exploring the remarkable vision and prose of Dylan Thomas." DJ Caruso called it "one of the great honours of my directorial life" to bring the story to screen alongside him.
Dolgellau Crowd Watches
Hundreds of people gathered in Dolgellau, Gwynedd, earlier this month to watch filming, which gives the production an immediate public footprint before the movie has even been released. New pictures show Zeta-Jones as an as-yet unnamed character, and that keeps the casting rollout ahead of any formal character reveal.
The title itself points back to a story with deep local roots. A Visit to Grandpa's first appeared in 1938 and was later included in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog in 1940, placing the adaptation inside a body of work that has long carried Dylan Thomas’s name beyond the page.
Wales, Thomas, Hopkins
The film follows a young boy sent to spend a summer full of adventure with his eccentric grandfather on a Welsh farm, a setup that gives the production a firmly Welsh setting from the start. Hopkins’s return to Welsh material, paired with Zeta-Jones’s arrival, makes this feel designed to travel on cast recognition as much as literary pedigree.
For viewers and the industry alike, the immediate signal is that this is no quiet literary exercise: filming has started, crowds are already turning out, and the project has enough draw to stage a public shoot in Gwynedd. The next thing to watch is how much of the cast and the film’s interpretation of Thomas’s story the production chooses to show before the camera work wraps.
