The 1968 movie character that inspired Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter: “Like a silent shark”
Anthony Hopkins crafted one of the most captivating villains in Hollywood history when he took on the role of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, embodying a character equally as intelligent as he was deranged, but he had never played a character quite like this before.
He’d portrayed some pretty intense antagonistic characters, but none like the iconic cannibal doctor for Jonathan Demme’s film, which required him to star opposite Jodie Foster, playing trainee FBI agent Clarice, assigned the task of hunting down Buffalo Bill.
Clarice goes to the smart, well-spoken and poised Hannibal, who is serving life behind bars for murdering and eating several victims, to try and glean a deeper insight into the mind of a psychopath. Thus, Lecter also has that distinctively horrifying presence that looms under the current of every sentence spoken, a coldness to him that is so unnerving, it’s hardly surprising that the performance won Hopkins an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’.
In fact, Hopkins would even come to reprise the role in a sequel, Hannibal, directed by Ridley Scott, such that you simply can’t imagine anyone else playing Hannibal other than him, for whom it is easily his defining role. Of course, he didn’t come up with Hannibal, as the character was first introduced in Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon, but he shaped him into the iconic figure that so many of us know and love from the shadows.
It turns out Hopkins referred to a classic 1968 villain when mapping out his plans to bring Hannibal to life, although not a human one, but rather, he was fascinated by the coldness of Hal 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the artificial intelligence assistant who becomes increasingly sentient and eventually rebels against the humans on board the mission, refusing to open the pod bay doors despite Bowman’s commands.
“He’s like a machine,” Hopkins said when describing Hannibal (via Variety), “He just comes in like a silent shark.” Who better to take inspiration from, then, than the ultimate villainous machine, one who blurs the line between human and mechanism?
Hannibal is so astute, so meticulous and articulate, that it seems like there’s a robot inside of him, pre-programmed to know exactly what to say and what to do, yet he lacks a moral backbone, like these AI machines. When it boils down to it, AI lacks empathy and human emotion, even if it’s full of knowledge and extreme capabilities, and you can say the same about Hannibal Lecter.
There was one human that Hopkins was inspired by, though, his RADA teacher, Christopher Fettes. “He had a cutting voice, and he would slice you to pieces. His analysis of what you were doing was so precise; it’s a method that stayed with me for all my life,” he admitted.
The Silence of the Lambs was a hit, winning ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, among other awards at the Oscars, and Hopkins’ performance was a big part of its success, one that is just so unforgettable, so hauntingly electrifying, and so confusingly brilliant.
