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" After the disastrous 2007 film Hannibal Rising, there were very few Hannibal Lecter fans who thought revisiting the character was a good idea. That is, until Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me) got his hands on the material and promptly signed Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen to play the iconic serial killer and Hugh Dancy as FBI Special Agent Will Graham. Suddenly, the project looked promising. Having seen the first five episodes of Hannibal, which premieres tonight on NBC, I can say it makes good on that promise, due in no small part to the performance by Hugh Dancy as Graham. I recently talked to Dancy about dining with Dr. Lecter, the shoes he&amp;#039;s filling, and sharing mantel space with Claire Danes. ESQUIRE.COM: I&amp;#039;m probably the harshest Hannibal critic you&amp;#039;ll find. The Silence of the Lambs is my favorite film. There were high expectations for this series, but you live up to them. HUGH DANCY: High expectations or low expectations, I guess, depending on which way you look at it. [Laughs.] I know what you mean. People who love this stuff really love it, so it&amp;#039;s interesting territory to get into. ESQ: I&amp;#039;ve always been a huge fan of Will Peterson&amp;#039;s performance of Will Graham, but your performance is more nuanced. Did you take cues from Manhunter or go back to the original novels? HD: I haven&amp;#039;t seen Manhunter because, when I came to this, I had seen the later movies with Hopkins and I hadn&amp;#039;t read the books. So the first thing I did after speaking to Bryan [Fuller] was to go back and read Red Dragon. Once I&amp;#039;d done that, there&amp;#039;s so much material in there that I really didn&amp;#039;t want to go off and look at somebody else&amp;#039;s take on it. I felt like I had everything I needed. ESQ: It&amp;#039;s big shoes to fill.  HD: Yeah, but then once you&amp;#039;ve lived with it yourself however long \u2014 we just wrapped, so we were doing it for seven months \u2014 I think it would feel pretty weird to sit down immediately and watch somebody else play the same guy. ESQ: Plus, you&amp;#039;re in this for the long haul, right? I hear that Bryan has pretty much scripted out the next 50 seasons of this show. HD: Put it this way: Bryan is an amazing font of imagination. I remember the first time we sat down, I had a bunch of questions which primarily asked, &amp;quot;Ok, where the hell do you go with this?&amp;quot; And he immediately answered that by describing four or five seasons worth of material. ESQ: Is it easier to work with someone like that, who&amp;#039;s basically a walking encyclopedia? HD: That was definitely true when we started, and I would say he almost generously hid that from me, because from an early point he was asking my opinion. How I saw this, and when we showed up looking at the sets. Little things. He&amp;#039;s a great collaborator, which is the real virtue of working with him. ESQ: Bryan tends to work with the same folks over and over again. How did you get this role? HD: I guess he didn&amp;#039;t want to inflict this on any of the people he knew and loved. [Laughs.] I was working in New York on a play on Broadway, and the script had come along, and I&amp;#039;d read it. Bryan and Martha De Laurentiis had come to the show, and we went out for lunch the next day. And that was that, really. We just talked. It was funny because I sat down not knowing what to expect and, by the end of the 45-minute meeting, I thought, God, I really hope this works out. And, suddenly I was thinking, Wow. Am I really going to sign myself away for seven years?  ESQ: The series feels like a procedural, but it&amp;#039;s so anti-procedural. It&amp;#039;s different from anything else on TV. HD: Yeah, I guess there&amp;#039;s a nod towards that. If you tried to force thirteen hours of TV out of just the Hannibal story, you&amp;#039;d probably drain it. So it helps to have other stuff going on in the background. ESQ: It&amp;#039;ll definitely be one of the goriest shows on network TV, but it doesn&amp;#039;t feel gratuitous. You literally start the series covered in blood. HD: Funny enough, that is some of the most technical stuff you do. I love all that because it&amp;#039;s fun working it all out with the director. It doesn&amp;#039;t give you nightmares. If anything, you come home stained. ESQ: You&amp;#039;re not exactly known for dark projects. HD: There&amp;#039;s certainly violence and horror because that&amp;#039;s the world that we&amp;#039;re in. But it&amp;#039;s got that kind of Grand Guignol quality to it. It&amp;#039;s all quite cooked up. ESQ: It&amp;#039;s not too episodic or monster-of-the-week. It has some very Bryan Fuller touches in it. HD: It is very Bryan Fuller, for sure. ESQ: Do you worry what fans will say about the creative changes? HD: If we&amp;#039;re going to get punished for that, then you&amp;#039;ll never get away with anything. Whether it&amp;#039;s from the books or the films, there are some people that will have a very fixed idea in their head. You&amp;#039;re not going to match that. At a certain point, you have to accept that. Actually, I&amp;#039;m interested to ask a question. For all of the areas where we&amp;#039;ve veered away from the novels, to a far greater degree, and particularly in an emotional sense, we&amp;#039;ve been very true to them, to the tone. So I ask you, with my heart in my throat, if you agree? ESQ: After watching the first five episodes, I feel like the show could easily be a Thomas Harris book written about these characters during this specific time period in their lives. HD: Oh, that is a massive compliment. ESQ: It feels like this was adapted from a Thomas Harris novel. HD: I really do think that&amp;#039;s true, and I think, as the season goes on and we get into the real meat of the dynamic between Will and Hannibal, that&amp;#039;s even more so. ESQ: Will Graham in Hannibal doesn&amp;#039;t really have anybody. In Red Dragon he had his family, but here he really only has his dogs and Agent Jack Crawford and Lecter, both of whom are manipulative. Are they Graham&amp;#039;s family? HD: I think Will&amp;#039;s family, when we meet him, is his dogs. It&amp;#039;s very simple. He has retreated from the world. But, yeah, [Jack and Lecter] are kind of the angels on his shoulder, except they both have warped ideas of what is good and bad for Will. I don&amp;#039;t think either of them is deliberately setting out to do wrong to Will. Jack cares about Will, but he cares more about the people he&amp;#039;s trying to apprehend. ESQ: How did you and Mads approach the relationship? Did you get together before shooting to hash it out? HD: We did. I think when we showed up, we both had a pretty clear idea, individually, of what we wanted to do. It just so happens they meshed extremely well. ESQ: I&amp;#039;m happy he doesn&amp;#039;t try to be Anthony Hopkins at all. In fact, it&amp;#039;s the opposite of that. HD: I know he&amp;#039;s seen those movies and loves them, but put it this way: You need a really good actor. You need a smart actor. You need somebody who can be charming and who can be sinister. All those things. But, more than anything else, you need an actor who&amp;#039;s not going to be overawed by that previous version of the character. ESQ: You can come to the series without having known who Hannibal is. How conscience were you and Mads about how much to reveal? HD: You have to make it with the assumption that your audience knows who Hannibal Lecter is because 99 percent of the world does. People who have never even seen the movie will quote you the line about Chianti. [Laughs.] It&amp;#039;s really a fun position to be in, from the minute Hannibal comes in. You don&amp;#039;t have to do any work establishing who he is.  ESQ: Even the episodic stuff feels like it&amp;#039;s somehow part of the bigger picture of the series. HD: Bryan is nothing if not dedicated to the details. When some episodic momentary thing happens, he&amp;#039;ll say, &amp;quot;Yeah, yeah, but that&amp;#039;s actually so and so,&amp;quot; and he&amp;#039;ll reference something from the books. Or he&amp;#039;ll say, &amp;quot;Once we get into season two, then you&amp;#039;ll find that this guy is doing X, Y, and Z.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s always knitting like that.  ESQ: Who do you most worry about pleasing: the fans, or fresh TV watchers? HD: This sounds like a kind of dodge, but of course I want both groups to be drawn into it. When we were filming, there was never a question of, &amp;quot;Well, couldn&amp;#039;t we just broaden this out a bit?&amp;quot; It did become clear to me, though, that you need a mixture of tones, because sometimes you just need to breathe when you&amp;#039;re watching it. It&amp;#039;s as simple as that. And that&amp;#039;s probably the biggest way you have to veer outside the world of the book. ESQ: Your wife Claire Danes has four Golden Globes and two Emmys for her TV work. Based on the strength of your performance in Hannibal, there could be a little family rivalry. Can you envision the two of you together at next year&amp;#039;s awards show, both nominated for these great, dark dramas? HD: I&amp;#039;m going to answer that in as roundabout a way as I can, for obvious reasons. [Laughs.] I think the fact that even the conversation might be had that this kind of TV would be rewarded, and obviously in the case of Homeland it has \u2014 I don&amp;#039;t think we&amp;#039;re in the same wheelhouse, exactly, but it&amp;#039;s ambitious and dark and so on \u2014 the fact that there&amp;#039;s an audience out there for that stuff makes me very happy. --Scott Neumyer is a freelance journalist from central New Jersey whose worked has appeared on ESPN.com, Wired.com, Details, and elsewhere. He likes a nice Chianti. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/interviews/a21513/hugh-dancy-hannibal-interview/>