8 Nuances That Made Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal So Great
7. How to Play A Genius Psychopath (When You're Not One)
The sheer weight of the character of Hannibal Lecter makes him an intimidating prospect for an actor. In many respects, he's similar to The Joker: he's not just any murderer, not just any psychopath capable of being profiled and put in a convenient psychosexual box. Both the Lecter narrative and the Batman narrative posit their villains as almost super-insane, practically a different species. And Lecter's a genius, a man always three or more steps ahead of his pursuers, playing Machiavellian games with the lives of the people around him. How do you even begin to get into the head of such a man? Mikkelsen understands that, in storytelling terms, there's a danger involved in portraying the smartest b*stard in the room:
"If you're smarter than everybody else, there's a certain amount of drama that just disappears because there is no danger. You will never, ever f**k up. He's always ending on the good side, right? It's a little like, if you read a scene and it says you come in and you are extremely sexy, the thing is, you cannot play sexy yourself. You have to make sure that they find you sexy. It's the same with intelligence But I think also there are little holes. He falls in little holes once in a while, especially when it comes to his own vanity, and that's where Will Graham is getting him: on his own vanity, that he starts believing he's bigger than God himself." - IGN
Mikkelsen believes that Lecter's superior intelligence, his high-culture elegance and his status as a creature one step removed from the rest of us is his Achilles heel. His vanity is the way in for an actor, to be able to understand him and to play him. Specifically, Will Graham is Lecter's weakness, and he doesn't fully understand that relationship to be a weakness until the season two finale with catastrophic results.