Looks like recent Cannes Best Actor winner Mads Mikkelsen (Thomas Vinterberg’s THE HUNT) will be the newest actor to take on the role of the sadistic, eerily intellectual, and sociopathic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter, most memorably played by Anthony Hopkins, (who won the Oscar as Lecter in 1991 for THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) in NBC’s new series HANNIBAL. The Danish Mikkelsen, who has made his mark as another great villain in the James Bond film CASINO ROYALE as Le Chifre and amassed accolades for his performance in Julian Schnabel’s THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, will step into the good doctor’s shoes for NBC’s upcoming television series, depicting the sociopath in during his killing streak, reports Entertainment Weekly.
Bryan Fuller, creator of such beloved but cancelled series as DEAD LIKE ME and PUSHING DAISIES, has penned the drama series. The series will involve a curious rendition of the typical cat and mouse game Lecter likes to play, assisting an FBI profiler (High Dancy) with a series of recent murders, while actually having committed them all. Fuller says:
It’s before he was incarcerated, so he’s more of a peacock. There is a cheery disposition to our Hannibal. He’s not being telegraphed as a villain. If the audience didn’t know who he was, they wouldn’t see him coming. What we have is Alfred Hitchcock’s principle of suspense — show the audience the bomb under the table and let them sweat when it’s going to go boom. So the audience knows who Hannibal is so we don’t have to overplay his villainy. We get to subvert his legacy and give the audience twists and turns.
HANNIBAL’s 13 episode series will probably premiere next season, just enough time for Dr. Lecter to begin searching for some supporting victims and French recipes before the show begins. Now where is that Chianti…?
It might be worth doing a little cross-check homework if you’re going to rock yourself out there as a critic, my good man — Mads was *not* anywhere to be seen in Julian Schnabel’s Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The lead was played by the wonderful Mathieu Amalric, a French actor, who played the latest Bond nemesis in Quantam of solace.