Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen tells Jane Mulkerrins why he is bringing serial
killer Hannibal Lecter to life
His name has become synonymous with dining on human liver, served with fava
beans and a nice chianti. Now Dr Hannibal Lecter, perhaps the most sinister of
all fictional serial killers, has a new face.
In Hannibal, the first television adaptation of the
legend of Lecter, the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen takes on the mantle of the
cannibalistic psychiatrist previously played by Brian Cox in Manhunter in
1986, and made most famous by Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning performance in
The Silence of the Lambs, in 1991. Hopkins later reprised the role, in
Hannibal a decade later and Red Dragon in 2002.
But Mikkelsen, whom many will recognise as the Bond baddy Le Chiffre from the 2006 remake of Casino
Royale, has a coolness that qualifies him perfectly for the
role, and is unfazed by his forerunners. “Both of those performances were
iconic, and I am not trying to emulate them. Anthony played Hannibal to
perfection,” says the 48 year-old, who won a Palme d’Or last year for his role
as a teacher falsely accused of sexually abusing a child in Thomas Vinterberg’s The
Hunt. “Luckily, we are starting in a different situation: my
Hannibal is not yet captured, I am still out on the loose, I am a practising
psychiatrist, and for that reason, I have to behave a little differently than
Anthony did.”
Mikkelsen eschews the flamboyant liver-eating “ff-ff-ff-ff” gestures of
Hopkins’s portrayal for a quite different take on the character, very
controlled, dapper and charming.
In fact, Bryan Fuller, the creator and writer of the American-made show which
begins on Sky Living next week, has taken for inspiration just two pages from
Harris’s 1986 novel Red Dragon – in which the book’s protagonist, FBI
Special Agent Will Graham, describes how his professional dealings with Lecter
led to the FBI man having a nervous breakdown and being institutionalised. From
this starting point Fuller has constructed a world in which Hannibal and Will
have a far closer relationship, that of psychiatrist and patient
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