Mads Mikkelsen: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

2. Dr Hannibal Lecter - Hannibal (2013-15)

It's one of the great tragedies of the supposed Golden Age of television that Hannibal was cancelled because of low ratings. It was an incredibly well made, perfectly cast and brilliantly brutal, and it's not like it was ever cancelled because of a lack of quality. Piracy didn't help, but that surely is just an indication of the excitement that met every episode's release?

Anyway, despite Anthony Hopkins claiming the title of "best Lecter ever" for a long time, Mikkelsen blazed onto screen as the character with an ethos built on his almost supernatural presence and his disarming, pitch black charm. Even if he didn't have a world of secrets and skeletons in his closet, you'd completely believe that something was very wrong with him.

The performance has ensured that Mikkelsen's Hannibal goes down as one of the greatest screen villains - or anti-heroes more appropriately - despite his capacity for awful, disquieting punctuations of true horror. That's masterful.

Rather wonderfully, it seems the show may return (with an August 2017 date floated as a starting point for discussions) and that can only be good news.