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DON’T GET MADS, GET EATEN

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.”

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 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

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

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

something else; this is before we see the

Hannibal Lecter we know. He’s out there in

• Hannibal: Season 2 is out on Dec 10.

and movements. Lecter takes a fervent interest in him as the two are alike in intellect, but Will can’t

DECEMBER 2014 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.co.nz

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