20 Huge Movie Characters Who Barely Spoke To Each Other
6. Hannibal Lecter & Jack Crawford - The Silence Of The Lambs
Just because two big characters don't interact with each other during a movie's events, that doesn't mean that they haven't done so before. In fact, it was made perfectly clear that Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) and Hannibal Lecter (Sir Anthony Hopkins) had spoken to each other before the events of Silence of the Lambs, something that only made the latter more intimidating.
The two referenced each other multiple times to Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling, and when Jack told her to believe him that she didn't want Hannibal Lecter in her head, it was strongly suggested that he was speaking from experience.
The theory throughout the film was that Jack sent Clarice, as untested and inexperienced a prospective agent as he could find, not just because she was a woman, but because he could send her in there without giving her an agenda for the killer to sniff out.
Making so many references to their past, and keeping them apart for the events of the film not only drove home the intimidation factor of Hannibal, since even the Head of the FBI's Behavioural Science Unit was too scared to face him, but it allowed Clarice to shine in the role, something that was unmatched in helping to make the story as brilliant as it was.