Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 8, 2001, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
His is the most brilliant maniacal mind in recent cinema history, one capable of committing the most hideous crimes while outwitting even the bravest and most resourceful agents out to capture him. But ask Anthony Hopkins, who reprises the flesheating Dr. Lecter in the new film Hannibal, about his approach to the role, and he’ll tell you there’s nothing intellectual about the process.
“I’m an actor,” he says simply, “so I just learn my lines and show up and do it. I gave [returning to Lecter] a little bit of thought. I got a video of Silence of the Lambs, put it on, watched it and thought, ‘Oh yeah, there he is.’ I hadn’t seen it in some time. Then I went off to Florence, did all the preparations—what he was going to wear—and talked to [director] Ridley Scott a little bit about it. He’s pretty flexible, he knows what he’s doing and he let me get on with it.”
It’s a deceptively simple way to describe essaying what is almost inarguably the most memorable of the movies’ recent antiheroes, a part that won Hopkins a Best Actor Oscar in 1992. Set a decade after the events of Silence of the Lambs (and opening almost exactly 10 years after Jonathan Demme’s now-classic chiller), Hannibal finds Lecter living a cultured life in Florence, Italy, having taken over the role of curator in a library crammed with objets d’art. He seems to have left his past existence as a murderous, cannibalistic doctor in the U.S. behind—but some people haven’t forgotten. These include FBI agent Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore), who once called on the imprisoned Lecter for help capturing another serial murderer, and has now come under fire after a botched drug raid.
At the same time, Mason Verger (an uncredited Gary Oldman), Lecter’s only surviving victim—albeit a horribly disfigured one—has hatched a revenge plot with a punchline almost as grisly as Lecter’s own crimes. The web he spins will ensnare an Italian police inspector (Giancarlo Giannini) and a conniving co-worker of Starling’s (Ray Liotta), and ultimately lead Starling and Lecter to their inevitable reunion.
While Lecter’s brilliance and homicidal inclinations haven’t changed, his surroundings are vastly different this time. If Silence was all about his confinement, Hannibal is about his freedom, which would suggest a change in Hopkins’ approach to the role. Again, though, the actor plays down such analysis. “You just take it day by day, on the locations,” he says. “All this twaddle that goes on about [acting], I let the intellectual giants get on with all the pontificating. I did say to Ridley Scott, on the first day, ‘It’s somehow strange being back.’ He said, ‘How do you feel?’ and I said, ‘Fine. He’s out of the box now.’ You just take it day by day and see what comes up.”
Expectations have been high for a Silence sequel since the original took a $130-million bite out of the box office and became only the third film in Oscar history to take all five of the top awards. While Hopkins had no doubt of the Silence’s potential for success (“I had a sense that it would be big box office; I did know that, the moment I read it”), he was startled by the Academy’s honor. “All I remember was that when Kathy Bates got on stage and said, ‘The Oscar goes to Anthony Hopkins,’ I looked around, because I really thought Nick Nolte would get it for Prince of Tides. I was very surprised, because it was sort of neck and neck between Nick Nolte and myself. And I went in without any expectations, which is part of my philosophy: No expectations, and then you don’t get disappointed.”
It was a philosophy he carried throughout Hannibal’s troubled journey to the screen. Once author Thomas Harris at long last completed the novel, producer Dino De Laurentiis snapped up the film rights for a record $9 million, only for Silence director Jonathan Demme, scripter Ted Tally and actress Jodie Foster to turn down return engagements. Hopkins, for his part, maintained a wait-and-see attitude. “When all the so-called stuff hit the fan, because Jodie wasn’t going to do it and Jonathan Demme wasn’t going to do it, I didn’t have any reaction, except, you know, a mild ‘Oh, OK,’ ” the actor recalls. “But I didn’t give any thought that maybe I should try to persuade anyone. I didn’t care, quite honestly, because I felt that if the movie was going to happen, it was going to happen, and if it wasn’t then it wasn’t. My agent had the same attitude; he said, ‘Let’s wait and see.’
“Then Dino phoned up and said, ‘We’ve got Ridley Scott,’ and I said, ‘Well, that’s pretty good, isn’t it?’ ” Hopkins continues. “Then they got [screenwriter] David Mamet, which I thought was a strange choice, but nevertheless I think he’s a wonderful writer. But I know he doesn’t do rewrites, so they had a bit of a problem there, and Steven Zaillian came in.”
Then there was the matter of replacing Foster; the announced candidates included everyone from The X Files’ Gillian Anderson to Boys Don’t Cry’s Hilary Swank. But when Scott brought up the possibilities to Hopkins, one name stood out in his mind. “I said, ‘Do I have any power over casting?’ and Ridley said no, but that I could make suggestions, and I said, ‘Well, I think Julianne Moore is very, very good.’ I did a film called Surviving Picasso with her, and Julianne’s character has a mental breakdown in one scene, and it was her very first day of work. We did a walk-through rehearsal, and then they said, ‘Are you ready?’ and she said, ‘Yeah.’ They said, ‘Roll camera,’ and she took about half a minute and then did it all in one take, and she was very good. So when Ridley asked me, ‘What do you think about her?’ I described that scene and said, ‘She’s fantastic—if you want an actor to be prepared, she’s it.’ ”
Then there was the matter of the book’s ending, in which Lecter drugs Starling and mentally makes her over into his partner in cannibalism. Many readers found this scenario preposterous, but not Hopkins. “I liked the ending, though the powers that be chose to do another one [for the movie],” the actor says. “I think it would have been very interesting, because I suspected that there was that romance and attachment there in my obsession with her. I sort of get that from the last phone call to Clarice in Silence of the Lambs. But I guess they talked to Thomas Harris, and they spent a lot of time together in Los Angeles—Harris and Steven Zaillian, Ridley and Dino—they stayed in a hotel and had conferences every day, talked about it and came up with the new ending.”
Prior to Hannibal’s production, reports circulated that Hopkins was reluctant to step back into Lecter’s shoes, upset that some young audiences had embraced his violent character and even saw him as a twisted hero. But the actor refutes these rumors, adding, “Everyone likes to be frightened; I would see Hitchcock movies when I was a kid. There’s so much hypocrisy and bullshit talk about it.” And now there’s the possibility that Lecter may stalk screens yet again, as De Laurentiis has announced plans for a second film version of Red Dragon, the Harris novel that first introduced the character, and which was previously filmed by De Laurentiis and director Michael Mann as Manhunter.
“It would have to be a good script,” Hopkins says of the possibility that he’ll take on the good doctor once more. “Ted Tally [who scripted Silence] is apparently writing the screenplay. I have no idea. It would be tempting.”
