10 WORST Actor Replacements In Movies

Anthony Hopkins' is the performance everyone remembers from The Silence of the Lambs (1991), in which he took over the role of intellectual cannibal Hannibal Lecter from Brian Cox. And yet the whole film turns on its lead, Jodie Foster, as junior FBI agent Clarice Starling. Her sharp yet doe-eyed performance provides not only the perfect counterpoint to Hopkins' charming psychopath but a seamless audience surrogate for dealing with material - cannibalism, flaying, weaponised projectile semen - that could otherwise be quite alienating.

Despite initial interest, both Foster and Lambs' director Jonathan Demme departed from the series because of the significant increase of violence and gore proposed for sequel Hannibal, with producers wanting to push away from the psychological aspects that made the original so, well, original, and tack closer to the horror norm. Thus, Julianne Moore was drafted in to take over.

Now, don't get your writer wrong, Moore is a fantastic talent, and she has put her stamp on countless top-tier films, but she didn't quite have the right approach for Clarice. Even if we put aside the fact that none of the stylistic and aesthetic choices for the character ring true, she still feels like an entirely different person - though not in the ten-years-later, sustained character development kind of way. More than this though, she lacks the chemistry that the original Clarice shared with Lecter, which is the key to the whole thing.