English director whose background in music videos and commercials served him well in Hollywood action films. After beginning as an album cover designer, Hopkins became a storyboard artist for Russell Mulcahy, then a director of videos. He next advanced to the position of set designer on Mulcahy's videos. A few years later, Hopkins began working as a video and commercial director. He later relocated to Australia where he reunited with Mulcahy, serving as second unit director on action sequences in the sci-fi cult hit "Highlander" (1986). This led to Hopkins's own directorial debut, "Dangerous Game" (1988).
He went Hollywood helming the fifth installment of the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series. His next feature, "Predator 2" (1990), managed to be a fairly stylish and absorbing action flick despite its clunky scripting. Hopkins followed up with "Judgment Night" (1993), a dark action film starring Denis Leary and Emilio Estevez. "Blown Away" (1994) was a conventional thriller about a terrorist on the loose in Boston, while "The Ghost and the Darkness" (1996) was a based-on-fact period piece about and engineer and a big game hunter who track the titular rampaging lions. Hopkins thenswitched gears to helm the big screen adaptation of the campy 1960s TV series "Lost in Space" (1998). Adopting a more earnest tone than the series, the film was visually impressive but the story left critics wanting. His next effort, the crime thriller "Under Suspicion" (2000), attracted little attention critically or commercially despite the presence of acting heavyweights Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman.
Turning to television, Hopkins' ability to craft stylish images around a compelling story gelled again when he helmed the pilot and several first-season episodes of the acclaimed action-drama "24" throughout 2001 and 2002. He also earned praise for directing USA's three-part drug trafficking miniseries "Traffic: The Miniseries" (2004), based on the 1989 British miniseries "Traffik" and the Oscar-winning 2000 feature film, earning an Emmy nomination as one of mini's producers. He also scored when he produced and directed the HBO biopic "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" (2005) starring Geoffrey Rush as the famed film comedian, with Hopkins earning DGA and Emmy nominations for his direction. Though Hopkins missed out on the DGA award, he did win the 2005 Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special.