Hugh Dancy on the Explosive Last ‘Hannibal’ Episodes

Hugh Dancy on the Explosive Last ‘Hannibal’ Episodes
Why Will Graham won’t be so triumphant at the end of this season after all — and what next year will bring
(Spoilers for the most recent episodes, obviously, herein.)

On the surface, Hannibal is the catch-me-if-you-can saga of Hannibal Lecter, a psychopathic psychiatrist portrayed by the mesmerizing Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, who dismembers and eats his victims with as much delight as he spouts off Shakespearean orations. But the bold, beautiful, and entirely transfixing NBC drama is so much more: At its core, the Bryan Fuller-conceived prequel to Thomas Harris’s acclaimed series of novels — Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, etc. — is a séance, a romance even, between Lecter and the man trying to catch him, Will Graham.

Graham, as portrayed by British actor (and Claire Danes’s hubby) Hugh Dancy, is the emotional heart of the show: an undoubtedly disturbed, obsessive, mentally unstable, genius criminal profiler. Graham exists to be Hannibal’s marionette. Or does he? As the show’s manic second season has so far proven, all bets are off. Does Will want to catch Hannibal, the man who framed him for murder last season? Or does he in fact want to learn his destructive ways? Or both? Is it all one big trap being set by Hannibal? And what the hell was up with Michael Pitt’s Joker-like performance? There are still many head-scratchers going into tomorrow night’s season finale. To that end, we turned to Dancy for some guidance. Or at least some semblance of emotional stability.

ESQUIRE.COM: So Hugh, I’d have to imagine it’s a little tough to recall what from the current season has aired.

HUGH DANCY: To a certain extent, yes. Because the last few episodes have cranked up the situation in terms of what’s going on in Will’s head. And I guess at the end of every episode, you’re left wondering with a slightly different perspective how far he’s gone. So yes. But we were shooting until fairly recently so it’s not like it’s off in the distant past.

ESQ: Speaking of traveling inside Will’s head, where is he currently at? On one hand, he’s clearly not entirely well. But then again he’s also seemingly tricking Hannibal into believing Will is, shall I say, coming over to the dark side with him.

HD: Right. So I mean, I think there are various possibilities. I think one possibility is Will wants revenge: We’ve seen fantasies where he kills Hannibal. One possibility is Will wants to just trap Hannibal in a traditional law-enforcement fashion and catch him red-handed. And one possibility is that he in fact has gone too far over to the other side and is seriously considering giving up [Laurence Fishburne’s] Jack Crawford and taking off with Hannibal. But what I think is that maybe all of those things can be true at once.

ESQ: He definitely seems conflicted. He had a chance to kill Hannibal when he was tied up in the menacing pedophile Mason Verger’s slaughterhouse, but perhaps that would have been too simple and obvious a death for such a horrible man.

HD: I think what Will says near the beginning of that episode is true and in a way is the most worrying thing about his state of mind at this point: He just wants to see what’s gonna happen. He’s surfing the moment in a way that we saw Hannibal doing so much in the first season in particular. But my feeling is there was a real pleasure for Will, and for Hannibal to a certain extent, standing up on that platform and Will looking at Hannibal thrust up and with a knife, and just for a moment both of them knowing what could happen. But also really knowing, in fact, what was going to happen. Which was that Hannibal would become Will’s means of revenge on Mason. I mean, there’s no ambiguity about the endgame: If he’s got a list of things he’d like to see happen in that moment, Mason getting his comeuppance is all right with him.

“TO HAVE MICHAEL PITT COME IN AND JUST SMASH THAT ALL UP WAS REALLY GOOD FOR US ALL.”

ESQ: Speaking of Mason Verger, Michael Pitt’s portrayal of him was incredible. It was so absurdly eerie and off-the-wall.

HD: Yeah. I thought it was very bold and very valuable for the show as a whole. Because we operate in such a kind of rarified atmosphere in a sense, there is a very particular tone that we strike. So to have somebody come in and just smash that all up was really good for us all. And yeah, I think Michael did that par excellence. When you come in and give that kind of performance you’ve got to do it with the confidence that you’ll be well-edited. That’s not meant to be a backhanded compliment. I think that’s exactly how you do it. You throw it all out there and see how it will end. And that takes real bravery. Which he definitely had.

ESQ: I’m still trying to grasp how Will feels about Hannibal. This is after all the man who framed him for murder. Yet these two are clearly loners and in many ways the only people who understand the other.

HD: As it gets closer to a point of no return, it’s going to get harder for Will. I know that because obviously I know what happens [laughs]. But here’s what I mean: At the point we’re at now, in terms of the episodes that have aired, none of the potential outcomes are really perfect for Will or can be perfect. I mean there’s a version in which Hannibal gets his comeuppance and I don’t know that that would be purely satisfying for Will. And there’s a version in which Will embraces his new self and really takes off with Hannibal. I don’t even know what that would mean exactly. Would they leave together? Would they embark on a series of murders? I think that Will has gone in some ways down that path and there’s actually been a part of that that’s been liberating. But could he totally embrace it? I don’t think so. So he’s basically stuck between a rock and a hard place.

ESQ: So is Jack Crawford. Will has committed a murder while, I guess you could say, on assignment for the FBI to lure Hannibal.

HD: Right. He thinks “What am I going to tell human resources?” [Laughs] Jack has always been the character who will unleash whatever is his best weapon. Regardless of the cost to that weapon. Which obviously up to this point has been Will. And at this point we’ve struck a bargain, I think me and him, we’ve been in cahoots more than was previously understood. But the final episode will clarify this to some extent — how much Jack was along for the ride, how much he was aware of. But there’s no question that Will is holding back to a certain extent as well. And the final scene in episode twelve there, I thought was so well-pitched by [showrunner] Bryan [Fuller], so well-balanced, that it’s very hard to know what direction Will is trying to tip Hannibal. [Eds. note: In that scene, Graham speaks with Lecter about their friendship. Warning that they will soon be caught, Graham suggests that Lecter “reveal” himself to Crawford.] ‘Cause you really believe that Hannibal might reveal himself to Jack because he thinks he could get him to commit an error. Or is that just very straightforward code for “Go and kill him”? I didn’t try and answer that for myself before we played it. In a sense I’m not sure Will knows which one he’s pushing for either.

“I DON’T THINK THERE’S EVER A COURSE OF EVENTS THAT WOULD SUDDENLY LEAVE WILL AS AN UNCONFLICTED PERSON.”

ESQ: Of course you won’t be revealing any spoilers for the finale. But does Will get any sense of closure in this season’s final episode?

HD: Let’s put it this way: I don’t think there’s ever a situation in which one episode you could describe a course of events that would suddenly leave Will as an unconflicted person. We really need four seasons of therapy — with different psychiatrists. How can I put this? I think that question hangs over the final episode right up until the last moment of the last scene.

“THE SHOW IS ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WILL AND HANNIBAL. AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE SO.”

ESQ: With this show it could be no other way.

HD: Exactly! The show is about the relationship between Will and Hannibal. And will continue to be so.

ESQ: Let’s talk a bit about your process of becoming Will Graham. In previous interviews you’ve mentioned that you thought he existed somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Is that correct?

HD: Well, actually to be clear about that, I don’t think I said that I believe Will is autistic, I really don’t, I think quite the opposite. There’s a bit of almost misdirection in the first episode of the first season when Jack Crawford comes to me in my lecture hall and asks me where I am on the spectrum. I guess maybe Will chooses not to disabuse him of that notion. In fact, if somebody on the autistic spectrum is somebody who has trouble reading other people and doesn’t glean the kind of information from others that most of us do, Will has exactly the opposite problem, right? He has a flood of information coming into him that he can’t really control at all. He doesn’t have the filter that stops us from receiving information. And he’s chosen to protect himself by adopting some of the behavioral qualities of the person on the spectrum.

ESQ: This is some in-depth stuff.

HD: I know. It sounds really overly complicated but basically it means he has chosen to shut himself down a bit. He has chosen not to make eye contact. He has chosen to be a bit of a loner so he appears to other people like he might be on the spectrum. I did play someone on the autistic spectrum a few years ago so I kind of understood. I was coming at it from that point of view. And I guess thinking about Will expanded my notion of what that spectrum might be, to include the idea that it might extend in the other direction. So rather than it be being “us” on one end and autistic people at the other, if you imagine you and me kind of somewhere in the middle and then an autistic person down on one side and then down on the other direction there are people who are far more open to sort of just receiving more information at all times. And maybe that pushes them toward what we call psychic. I don’t think Will is psychic but that was the overall understanding I came to.

ESQ: Okay. I think I understand. Although my brain admittedly hurts. But this is why I love the show. It might appear to be of the slasher-flick variety, but it’s so deep and psychological.

HD: For sure! I guess you could see it as people just dying left, right, and center. But we love talking so much.

ESQ: Exactly. The best scenes for my money are when it’s just Will and Hannibal talking in Hannibal’s office.

HD: And it’s so unlikely that that should ever happen on a TV show. Or certainly this kind of TV show. That at the center of every episode you’d have just two guys sitting opposite each other in chairs mouthing off. I love all the different elements of the show but I think that probably is the most enjoyable.

ESQ: Your acting skills — especially on a physical level — were put to the test earlier this season when Will was largely confined to a small jail cell.

HD: It’s challenging. In one sense it helps you because it focuses the intensity of the situation. And it focuses your own choices because they’re limited. In another sense, it is kind of restricting. We had [jail cell] bars as well. I think it was for sound purposes that they decided we couldn’t do what they had in Silence of the Lambs, which is a big glass screen.

ESQ: Ah, okay. That makes sense.

HD: When you’ve got a bar every six inches or whatever it becomes really technical and somewhat unspontaneous. Because most of what you’re doing is trying not to get a bar in the middle of the shot. I guess there was a kind of pleasure to that, but it does get a little tedious after a while. I remember in the first season, we had more like “cases of the week,” and you try to find a different way to approach each one and to still feel like you’re in the wheelhouse of the show and the character and that it means something personal. And after a while that can get a bit challenging. But when I got out of jail this season and I was off, I guess it’s the eighth episode when the lady has been sewn inside the horse, and I got to do all that again. I got to stand there and pluck all of this information out of the air. That’s a tricky thing to do as an actor, to make it seem that you really are arriving at all of these conclusions, and for it not to seem preposterous. And I thought, “Oh, I remember this! I really missed this.” It brought me back. It was like, “Ah, maybe I should not have complained so much about this the first season because the alternative is being in a small box.”

ESQ: Before I let you go, I want to give you a major congratulations on the show being picked up for a third season.

HD: It’s great! I would have been sad to leave it where we do leave it. Because the story isn’t done. And one of the nice things about TV, I suppose, is that you sense the support while it’s still being rolled out. You feel that people are out there rooting for you. And that’s great. I’ve never been involved in something that people have taken such an active interest in and responded to with their own thoughts and their own pieces of art and whatever it may be. So yeah, I’m thrilled. I feel like we’re in a pretty good place with the viewing numbers, they’re creeping up. And slowly but surely the word spreads outside of that really great fanbase that we have. So it’s a nice way to go into the third season.

Source: Esquire.com