The Oscar-winning 1991 role Tim Curry “desperately wanted” but couldn’t even get an audition for
It’s fascinating to imagine some of cinema’s most beloved movies with a different actor in the lead, and perhaps the movie would’ve been worse, or it would have been way better, but the thing is, we’ll never know.
Imagine Leonardo DiCaprio actually going ahead with playing Patrick Bateman in American Psycho instead of Christian Bale, or British actor Emily Watson playing Amélie; it’s hard to picture many iconic roles in the hands of a different actor, especially when a character has gone down in cinema history as inseparable from the person who brought them to life.
For Tim Curry, there was a certain role he was dying to play, but he was ultimately unlucky, failing to even secure an audition, which soon became one of horror’s most iconic villains, and if Curry had got the job, who knows what his career would look like now?
I’m talking about Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, which of course went to Anthony Hopkins, who would even scoop up an Oscar for his performance, and it was truly unnerving to see the Welsh star balancing the terror with an innate wit and intelligence that could charm anyone. Starring opposite Jodie Foster, who played Clarice, an FBI agent in training sent to interview Hannibal to learn more about the mind of a cannibalistic murderer, Hopkins turned in a career-defining performance.
He later reprised the role in Hannibal, too, cementing himself as one of horror’s most indelible antagonists, but Curry was desperate for the part. He was, of course, no stranger to playing villains, having just starred in the American miniseries IT, playing Pennywise, the terrifying clown who gets a kick out of tormenting children.
This adaptation of Stephen King’s novel was a huge success, and it became one of Curry’s most well-known roles besides Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Perhaps it was too soon for him to take on another huge villain role.
For whatever reason, as the moment unfolded, Curry quickly accepted that this wasn’t going to be his role. “One of my great regrets is that I read the script of Silence of the Lambs and I desperately wanted to play Hannibal Lecter,” he revealed in his memoir, Vagabond, “My agent couldn’t get me in the room, but Tony Hopkins did a great job.”
A bunch of actors were considered for the part, like James Bond’s own Sean Connery, Derek Jacobi, Al Pacino, and Daniel Day-Lewis, with director Jonathan Demme clearly opening up the part to a range of age groups, but despite their individual brilliance, it’s hard to imagine any of these other Hollywood actors in the role that ultimately went to Hopkins.
To be fair, you can imagine Curry, out of all of them, being a really good Hannibal Lecter, but how many iconic horror villains can one actor really take on? It all worked out for the best in the end, because Hopkins’ performance as Hannibal was legendary, and even Curry knows that no one else could touch it.
