8 Nuances That Made Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal So Great
6. About Cannibalism
The word cannibalism comes from a Spanish name for a tribe in the West Indies that ate human flesh: it literally means savage. That's how we see the cannibal, as someone bestial, barbaric, rending flesh with filed teeth. That's not Hannibal Lecter, of course yet previous iterations of the character havent delved much into why he might engage in such a gruesome practice. It's been described as a kind of fetishised trophy collection, and Lecter's back story in the novels and the films has been retrofitted to include childhood trauma that, in classic armchair psychological fashion, is blamed for his present psychopathy.
All of which is rather dull to Mikkelsen, who dislikes the idea that Lecter is the way he is because of some horrendous, seismic event that rewrote his brain as a young man. In a recent interview with shortlist.com, he points out that cannibalism is different. Cannibals think the only way to possess someone, to truly love someone, is to consume them, even though Hannibal tends to eat rude people."
Mikkelson believes that Hannibal tends to eat most of his victims dismissively, treating them as a lesser being his consumption of their flesh in his opulent, almost arcane gourmet meals is a way of elevating the rude, the uncultured, the boring or the venal, raising them to his level by transforming them into art, then consuming them. This doesn't hold true for everyone, however: with Will, the act of transformation isn't as important, because he already sees Will as a being on his level. No, in season three Lecter comes to believe that he needs to eat Will: ironically, to get him out of his system, to conquer him by consuming him.