8 Nuances That Made Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal So Great
4. Hannibal As Fallen Angel
"To Hannibal, psychopaths are banal, as they all have a reason for killing: a f*cked-up mum, a dad that hit them, whatever. For me, he's the fallen angel: Satan on Earth, a man who sees beauty where the rest of us see horror. Or, at least, that's what I based him on." - shortlist.com
Mikkelsen plays Hannibal Lecter as a different kind of monster: one removed from the human race, demonic. Where the FBI seek to profile psychopathic serial killers, placing them into convenient boxes that claim to understand their individual obsessions, their little madnesses, Mikkelsen believes that Lecter cannot be fully understood in this way.
That's why Will Graham is the only one who comes close, the only one who had a prayer of catching or stopping him. Graham empathises with the subjects he pursues, making instinctive intuitive leaps: where an intellectual, psycholanalytic approach would fail. Lets not forget, Doctor Hannibal Lecter is a renowned forensic psychiatrist and profiler himself, a man whos trained himself to identify and examine others like him and expunge their weaknesses from his modus operandi. To Mikkelsen, Lecter isn't just a sick man: he's not necessarily a person at all, anymore. He's something alien, inhuman fallen.