STACK NZ Magazine December Issue 58

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Dr Hannibal Lecter can show us how to relish life’s
wonders even as he indulges in appallingly violent
taboos, according to actor Mads Mikkelsen.
He spoke with Zoë Radas from Denmark.
S tately actor Mads Mikkelsen has long
been considered an augury of Danish
cinema’s revival – after appearing in
several Danish films in the early ‘00s, he
ventured into the mainstream as villain Le
Chiffre in Casino Royale (2006) and then
starred in the 2012 Danish-language
international hit The Hunt , in which he played
a kindergarten teacher accused of sexually
abusing a child, and for which he won the Best
Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival.
His strange, graceful, finely-hewn features
are now familiar to a rapidly expanding
fanbase which hails Hannibal, the new series
based upon novelist Thomas Harris’s
characters, as one of the best crime shows on
television. Following in the footsteps of some
famous thespians in portraying the notorious
cannibalistic psychiatrist, Mikkelsen is both
humble and confident in his belief that
Hannibal brings fresh, morbid fascination to
the character of Dr. Lecter.
“Obviously they are big shoes to wear,” he
says simply and warmly. “Anthony Hopkins
and Brian Cox have played [Hannibal] to
perfection. But [in the show] we can do
something else; this is
before we see the
Hannibal Lecter
we know. He’s
out there in
the real world and [he has] to make friends
and has to, to a certain degree, be a friendly
person – almost normal.”
Yes, almost normal indeed. Mikkelsen’s
Hannibal wears his cultured interests on his
sleeve, and despite the character’s sociopathic
tendencies, he holds beauty – and more
importantly, truth – in the highest regard.
“Hannibal is a very honest character in many
ways, even though it might be a facade to
some people,” Mikkelsen says. “I don’t think
he has lied once in the show, he’s always
wrapping it up in something.”
In a perfect example, one of the early
scenes in the second season sees Hannibal
serving a delicate meal (the homicidal origins
of which we can only guess) to Special Agent
Jack Crawford, played by Laurence Fishburne.
“I can’t quite place the fish,” Crawford muses
as he samples the succulent meat. “He was a
flounder,” Lecter replies. Says Mikkelsen: “He
will never lie directly; for him that would be a
banality. He loves everything that’s beautiful in
his life and he hates everything that’s banal.”
This savouring of beautiful things is,
Mikkelsen believes, quite special. “I mean, if
there’s anything we can learn from Hannibal
Lecter – don’t get me wrong, there’s not a lot
of good things I think we should learn from
him – he’s living his life fully. He doesn’t want
to waste ten minutes of his life with eating
something that’s not delicious, or spending
time with people that he hates. He always
tries to find something that will awaken his
curiosity, and obviously Will Graham is one of
them. He finds Will Graham to be a talented,
gifted young man who just needs a little
guidance to see the light.”
Will Graham, played with keen
perceptiveness by British actor Hugh Dancy,
is a criminal profiler who has an intense
knack for putting himself in a psychopath’s
shoes: visualising the crime and
deducing a killer’s intentions
and movements. Lecter
takes a fervent interest in
him as the two are alike
in intellect, but Will can’t
easily compartmentalise his feelings, and
the beginning of the second season sees
him institutionalised, as his work has taken a
heavy mental toll.
“We are like two sides of the same
coin,” Mikkelsen says (and often switches
between referring to Lecter as a character
and then using personal pronouns, which
is both disconcerting and charming). “Will
Graham is full of empathy; he cannot control
his empathy, his empathy controls him. As
opposed to me, I’m full of empathy as well
but I control it, I decide when I’m happy, when
I’m sad, when I’m emotional. It’s a decision
that Hannibal makes,” he says. “With Will
Graham’s character, he has no chance in hell.
He’s at the mercy of his empathy.”
Mikkelsen praises the show’s writer Bryan
Fuller in extrapolating the personalities of
these characters; Fuller is both loyal to their
legacy, but not bound by, or a slave to, the
voluminous past material. “Bryan... was
pitching [the show] to me; he had about 20
minutes but he continued for three hours,
on to season five or something, and I could
just tell that his energy was amazing and he’s
a brilliant man. And the path he was going
around was very interesting,” the actor says.
“It sounded exactly as I would have done if it
was in my hands. He was the one that solely
persuaded me that we were doing something
different... something that is our own.”
Fuller has mentioned director David Lynch’s
surreal motifs and visual style as being among
his inspirations, and Mikkelsen believes
these interests are bringing the show into a
new, strange place. “[Fuller] has been lifting
the visual of the show into what we can call
the Hannibal Universe,” he explains. “If you
imagine a painting painted by Dr. Lecter, this is
what it would look like... it’s almost beautiful in
the middle of being grotesque.”
This mix of beauty and disgust is one
Mikkelsen sees as central to the character
of Hannibal. “He sees the beauty on the
threshold of death and I think there’s
something true in that,” he says. “Whether
it’s a natural death or it’s an unnatural death,
there’s a finality there, there’s a beauty there,
there is no turning back right there. Obviously
that’s where shocking things can happen,
but also beautiful things. And that is how he
approaches life. He is, as I call him, the Fallen
Angel. He sees beauty where the rest of us
see horror. For him, it is not that black and
white.”
• Hannibal:
Season 2
is out
on Dec 10.
DON’T GET MADS,
GET EATEN
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