The Hannibal Lecter moment Anthony Hopkins refused to take on: “He’s a Renaissance Man”
One of the United Kingdom’s greatest-ever actors with a distinguished career that spans decades he may be, but Hannibal Lecter will always be the role that defines Anthony Hopkins.
He was an established and vastly experienced thespian long before he was cast as the cannibalistic psychiatrist with a fondness for mind games, but winning an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs propelled his star to brand new heights.
The third and final film so far to win the ‘Big Five’ at the Oscars, the psychological thriller with lashings of horror became such a cultural force that a sequel was an inevitability. With the benefit of hindsight Hopkins admits that he should have only played the part once, but it was author Thomas Harris who was compelled to craft a literary follow-up for blatant commercial reasons.
Producer Dino De Laurentiis spent years insisting the writer speed up his process and finish the book, and when he did, the rights were scooped up for a princely $10million. Hannibal hit bookshelves in June 1999, with production getting underway on the feature-length adaptation just 11 months later.
With Jodie Foster out of the picture, Julianne Moore was drafted in as the sequel’s Clarice Starling, and Hopkins could have feasibly been replaced too if the movie was a slavish translation of its source material. On the page, Lecter performs plastic surgery on himself to elude the authorities and evade capture, something the leading man discussed with director Ridley Scott but ultimately opted to omit.
“Ridley and I agreed to leave the face alone,” he told the BBC. “It’s as if he’s making a statement; ‘catch me if you can’. With his big hat, he’s so obvious that nobody thinks he’s Hannibal Lecter. I’ve always thought he’s a very elegant man, a Renaissance Man.”
With Foster having already turned down Hannibal, there was at least a backup plan should Hopkins hypothetically follow suit. All it would have taken was for the film to lean into the plastic surgery angle to explain the recasting, which would have made perfect sense for readers because that was exactly what happened in the novel.
Instead, Hopkins and Scott decided that a very big hat would serve much the same function, and a plastic surgery subplot would have only served to weigh down a sequel that was already plenty bloated without it. It was a huge success in cinemas after clearing $350million at the box office, though, but it was a major step down from The Silence of the Lambs in every way.
Undeterred, Hopkins would reprise the role yet again in Red Dragon, which he’s held his hands up and acknowledged wasn’t the right thing to do in retrospect.
