Why Robert De Niro rejected Hannibal Lecter and ‘The Silence of the Lambs’
As one of the most transformative actors in history, Robert De Niro was no stranger to putting himself through personal hell in order to give the best possible performance, which makes it fascinating to imagine what he could have done with Hannibal Lecter.
Undoubtedly the defining role of Anthony Hopkins’ career, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs didn’t feature a massive amount of screentime for the psychologist-turned-cannibal, but it was more than enough to create a cinematic icon and win the star an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’.
One of his competitors in the race for the prize that year was none other than De Niro, who’d himself gone against the grain to play a chilling, manipulative, and dangerous presence in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear. Max Cady and Dr. Lecter weren’t all that different in some respects, but he couldn’t do both.
When asked by The New Yorker if there were any roles he regretted turning down over the years, De Niro may have answered in the negative, but there was still a gig that he felt worth mentioning. “There was one that I didn’t do,” he admitted. “Jonathan Demme was asking me to do the one that Anthony Hopkins did.”
It’s impossible to imagine Lecter being played by anyone else given what Hopkins brought to the part and the way it seared itself into the collective consciousness, but he was far from the only name on the shortlist. Sean Connery was said to be Demme’s first choice, Forest Whitaker revealed he’d auditioned for it, with De Niro’s contemporaries Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman also being floated as potential candidates.
The Raging Bull and Casino headliner shared that “Jonathan was calling me about it, and I had to make a decision about something I was doing and I didn’t want to hold him up, so then he decided to use Anthony Hopkins.” The Silence of the Lambs began shooting in November 1989, right after Goodfellas wrapped but before Backdraft and Cape Fear, so he simply couldn’t find the time in his schedule.
Ironically, Lecter ended up beating De Niro’s Cady to ‘Best Actor’. Looking at the way he made his name on completely immersing himself into his most memorable characters, it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that he could have nabbed the big one had he ended up making room in his calendar to scare Jodie Foster witless and give rise to one of the industry’s favourite flesh-eating murderers.
Of course, Hopkins is note-perfect in every respect, but the prospect of seeing The Silence of the Lambs with De Niro as Lecter is a mouth-watering one, even if the latter was “happy for all its success” when it happened without him.
