IGN and Variety: Bryan Fuller Interviews about the Finale

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IGN: Hannibal: Bryan Fuller on the Huge Events in the Season 3 Finale and Continued Hopes for the Future

Hannibal’s third season has ended and needless to say, some huge events occurred. But is that it for the show? In the wake of NBC’s cancellation of the series, no new distributor has been found, as the actors have been released from their contracts and moved on to other roles. But when I spoke to Bryan Fuller for a post-finale conversation, he revealed that there is still some hope that we could see Dr. Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham again.

Of course, given how Season 3 ended, fans got a very strong conclusion, if it needs truly serve as that… one post-credit dinner scene aside that more directly aims towards a new storyline. Read on to see what Fuller – who is currently working on an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods at Starz — had to say about Hannibal and Will’s big fall, Bedelia’s fancy meal, Chilton and Alana’s fates and much more.

IGN: If the show were coming back next year on NBC, I’m sure I’d jump to questions about how Hannibal and Will survived, but given the circumstances, do you want people to even assume they survived? Or are you fine with people thinking, “That’s it and both of them are dead”?

Fuller: Well, I think if there were a Season 4, of course they would survive but there’s still… The conversation is still in play in so many ways and I may be holding on to false hope that we’ll be able to continue telling a bit of the story because I love these actors and would love to continue working with them. I think it works both ways where if you are satisfied by this conclusion to the series, then that can be the end. if you are wanting more story then there is a version of events yet to be told.

IGN: You’ve had a long term plan for this show for quite a while, but at what point did you know that the Red Dragon story specifically was going to end this way?

Fuller: About half way through the season, we knew that the great conclusion for Hannibal and Will, with everything they’ve experienced this season, would be for them to actually kill the Red Dragon together as two jackals taking down a wildebeest. That felt very organic. Then we started talking about Moriarty and Sherlock over Reichenbach Falls and how that was an interesting direction to go for us, because Sherlock survived. You get your cake and get to eat it too, where you have a big, epic finale where there are gasps and apparent losses of lives and then you are able to continue telling that story by just simply saying “they survived the falls.”

IGN: Not that it wasn’t a clear part of the show to many people, including myself, before but the final two episodes especially got more explicit with the idea of this essentially as a tragic, gothic romance, including Bedelia and Will directly discussing Hannibal being in love with Will. Did it just feel like now was the time to be more overt with that conversation?

Fuller: Well it felt like it was — it felt like they would be talking about it. It felt like he would ask that question. It wasn’t a strategy of “let’s wait and reveal this now,” it just felt, as we were writing those scenes, Will would ask that question because Hannibal’s behavior is indicative of someone who is obsessed and it seemed that Will would not be terribly bright if he hadn’t figured out there was some romance going on there. For me, Hannibal has always been a romantic horror story. Even from the get go of the series. I was fascinated by the idea of telling the story of a “bromance” between these two gentlemen that called into question how men relate to each other.

IGN: When they go off the cliff, it’s Will who pulls them off. Do you think Hannibal is a willing participant in that and accepting of that or do you think that’s all Will in that moment?

Fuller: I think he’s surprised in the moment that it happens. I think he’s surprised that it happens, but then a millisecond later he’s like, “Of course, that’s what he would do.” Because earlier in the episode, Will tells Hannibal very plainly that his survival is not necessary for him to accomplish what he wants to do, which is to end Hannibal. And he said very early on in the season or it was said very early on that if he doesn’t kill Hannibal, he fears that he will become him and that comes back to haunt him in the Red Dragon arc and we see how much joy he actually does take from killing another man, side by side with Hannibal Lecter. It’s operatic and poetic and also sickening.

IGN: When Dolarhyde is going to kill Hannibal, there’s a great moment with Will calmly drinking his wine, watching this go down, because this is what his plan is. But then right before Dolarhyde stabs Will it looks like Will is reaching, like he’s going to pull a weapon. At that moment, might Will have changed his mind?

Fuller: Yeah, I think that in that moment… What Will was afraid of — and the reason that he co-opted Dolarhyde into his plot, in as much as Dolarhyde felt that he was co-opting Will into his plot — was Will’s fear was that when it comes right down to it, he cares too much about Hannibal to kill him but kill him he must.

IGN: The ending being what it is, if the show comes back, we’ll see how they survive and if not, that could be their end but what’s happening with Bedelia is a huge, much more overt question. Should we assume she did that to herself? Should we assume that’s a time jump? What would you have people take from that?

Fuller: Well, I think what they should take from it is that the story is not over and somebody cut off Bedelia’s leg and is serving it to her and she just grabbed her fork and hid it under her napkin and she’s going to plunge it into the next person that walks into that room. And that if there had been a Season 4, we would have seen a continuation of that dinner.

IGN: Is there anything you can say about when that’s taking place? Is it taking place simultaneously to what we just saw with Will and Hannibal?

Fuller: I think we can safely say it’s after what Will and Hannibal experienced, suggesting one or both of them may have survived.

IGN: Okay. See, I was way off on that one! Let me ask about Chilton, who I have described as the horror version of Wile E. Coyote at this point.

Fuller: [Laughs]. Yeah, Hannibal’s Kenny!

IGN: [Laughs]. Except Kenny at least gets to come back looking the same.

Fuller: Right!

IGN: Clearly, Chilton’s role had already changed a lot. Alana was doing much of what Chilton had done traditionally in Red Dragon and Silence. If the show does continue in some form, did you have a specific idea of how Chilton could figure in, given his physical limitations at this point?

Fuller: There are miraculous leaps and bounds in grafting technology these days, so I always imagined that if we ever got around to Silence of the Lambs, we would see him back control of the institution with a scarred face. There’s something so haunting about a scarred Chilton flirting with Clarice Starling in the manner that he does in the book. “Baltimore can be a really fun town, if you have the right guide.”

IGN: Now you make me really want to see that moment. Continuing on that thread, the Red Dragon story was interesting for you guys because it began pretty faithful to the book and then you started moving things around, like having Molly get attacked much earlier or having Chilton be targeted instead of Freddie. Was it fun for you to on one hand do the most direct adaptation you’ve done since the series began but then begin to subvert it?

Fuller: Yeah, and really it was [episode] eleven that kind of shifted things around. You think, well, what they would do here is that the cops would show up before anybody else and you would save the attack on the family for the end. But since I knew that the ending had to be Hannibal and Will gleefully killing Dolarhyde side by side as murder husbands, we were able to shore up the telling of the tale from the novel to basically supplant the novel and the previous adaptations’ ending with an ending that was unique to our show.

IGN: What about choosing Chilton to be Dolarhyde’s target and not Freddie? Obviously, you had already had some fun with using “Freddie’s” traditional death in the Season 2 fake out, so how much did that play into it?

Fuller: The big motivation, honestly, was that we didn’t want to see that happening to a woman, so Chilton was the perfect replacement for Freddie Lounds in that instance. We gave him the authorship of the Hannibal story and he was telling the Red Dragon story in a novel so he was the writer that could be targeted by Frances Dolarhyde. But like I said, it all boils down to I didn’t want to see a man biting the lips off of a woman and burning her alive.

I also actually think it’s more fun that it’s Chilton. We have more invested in Chilton in terms of his relationship to Hannibal Lecter. For me, it’s a more satisfying story move for that to be happening to Chilton than Freddie Lounds. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I wanted to see that scene, but I knew we couldn’t do it exactly like it was done in previous adaptations and in the novel because we had stolen the thunder of it in Season 2. Yet what we did in Season 2 could, in a clever way, set up what was going to be a repeat of that sequence.

IGN: You don’t directly, in flashback or what not, go into Dolarhyde’s childhood in detail, although it is referenced several times and there’s that little flash of the nursing home his grandmother ran. Did it just seem that, given the focus of your show and how much you had going on already, you didn’t want to as directly go into Dolarhyde’s past like the book does?

Fuller: The big fear, honestly, is child actors. I thought a glimpse of him as a child would be great but once you see a child actor imbuing characteristics of a more sophisticated actor, it kind of diminishes power. We all saw the terror that poor Jake Lloyd unwittingly unleashed on audiences as Anakin Skywalker. So I just didn’t want to go near it but I wanted to, at the same time, be able to service the hardcore audience who knows the book and knows that his grandma was the real source of the Red Dragon and give them just a fleeting stab of that in an episode where we were talking about the impact of family. We see this very strange family dinner with a little boy and we know that there is a whole story behind it, but we got the tip of the iceberg of just how f**ked up his childhood was.

IGN: Reba’s final scene was another where you got to really pull direct quotes from the book. But here, I was reading it as Will can also be projecting about himself, as he talks about what it might be like to have a serial killer in love with you. Was that in your mind too, given you had these great quotes from the book but that it could definitely be maybe be a bit more of an echo here, given the situation.?

Fuller: Oh, absolutely. It was a great synchronicity of events where everything that Will was saying to Reba in the novel actually applies to Will Graham in the television series. So there was the want of seeing that scene because I haven’t seen it in any of the adaptations where we get to see Reba, post all of this, and have a quiet moment between the two people who were in love with serial killers.

IGN: Is Reba a character that, if you got to continue at some point, you might want to revisit? We never saw her again in the books, but we never saw Will again either, as far as the Red Dragon aftermath is concerned.

Fuller: This is the first time I’ve worked with Rutina Wesley and I hope it’s not the last. Yeah, if we were going a fourth season, I would absolutely bend over backwards to bring her back because she’s a goddamn delight.

IGN: One small clarification I wanted to ask is Will and Jack come up with this plan — well, Will first suggests it — about using Hannibal as the bait but the one thing that we know that Jack doesn’t know is that Dolarhyde has already attacked and spoken to Will. Is it safe to say that Jack does not know that at all during all of this?

Fuller: Yes. Jack is assuming that Will knew exactly when he did, which is that Dolarhyde may have survived. The interesting part of Jack Crawford going along with the plan is that, if you remember in the Italian chapter, Jack says he didn’t kill Hannibal Lecter because he needs Will Graham too and that sentiment is still haunting Jack. I think in the back of Jack’s mind, he knows that it is highly likely that this is going to go off the rails. But when it does go off the rails, it’s also highly likely that Hannibal Lecter and Francis Dolarhyde and perhaps even Will Graham will be dead and all of those things are sadly acceptable in Jack Crawford’s mind.

IGN: Hannibal said some very pointed things in the finale to Alana about borrowed time and almost insinuating that not only she but her entire family were in danger. Suffice to say that given the chance, he would have been gunning for her after they dealt with Dolarhyde?

Fuller: Absolutely. That was going to be one of the fun arcs in the fourth season. Hannibal’s want to keep that promise and Alana’s desire to be one step ahead of him and do everything that she could to make sure she stayed out of his [sight]. That’s one of the things… Of all the characters, Alana is perhaps the only one that has some semblance of a happy ending.

IGN: There had been this whole question of how much darkness was inside Will. We don’t see how things ended with him and Dolarhyde, after he suggests the idea of Hannibal. But Dolarhyde leaves and he ends up killing a bunch of cops. I feel like maybe if Will had told Jack, “Dolarhyde came to me. I can tell you where I saw him,” things have gone differently.

Fuller: The episode is called “Wrath of the Lamb” for Will being single-minded about Hannibal’s destruction and the fear that he himself wouldn’t be able to do it when push came to shove and needing Francis Dolarhyde to really take it all the way. When he’s sitting in Bedelia’s chair in episode 12 and saying “Damned if I’ll feel,” he’s trying to harden himself. What he did to Chilton, however inadvertently or however unintentionally, he still did a shocking, unethical, immoral thing and that’s a slippery slope for Will. I feel like in order to understand Will’s acceptance on how he could sacrifice so much, including himself, just to put an end to Hannibal, we have to go back to that episode and see his struggle with what has happened to Chilton and how he’s hardening himself after that fact and goes beyond the “save yourself a lot of trouble and crush them all” recommendation that Bedelia gave him in therapy, to allowing himself to be crushed as well in the waves of the Atlantic.

IGN: With Siouxsie singing.

Fuller: “I will survive!”

IGN: [Laughs] All your finales had a certain sense of closure, but this one felt more so. Given some of the events in those last episodes, I wondered if maybe you were being extra careful in case the show didn’t come back. Is that true? Or regardless of whether Hannibal was coming back for three more seasons on NBC or not, was this how it was going to play out?

Fuller: I think this is how it would have ended regardless. The idea for Season 4, which we kept going back and forth on, I was like, “This is an arc for a season that I want to do and we can either do it in Season 4 or we can do our version of Silence of the Lambs in Season 4 and then get back to it in Season 5.” But I really feel like it organically goes in Season 4, before any sort of Silence of the Lambs arc, because there’s a lot to address and a lot to unpack. So I stand by this ending as the appropriate ending for Season 3, whether it was going into a Season 4 or whether it was ending where it stood.

IGN: I have to follow up with what you said about there still being some conversations about the future of Hannibal. Anything you can elaborate on that or with whom we might expect if it were to come back?

Fuller: Martha [De Laurentiis] is still trying to get financing on a film, so I’m curious what her perspective… They’ve explored Kickstarter for a film. They’ve talked about traditional financing. So there are conversations still ongoing and I’m mainly curious how the audience will react to this finale and whether the audience will say, “Okay, great, you scratched our back. We’re satisfied. That feels like an appropriate ending and we’re done with the story now.” Or if the audience is going to say, “I want more of Mads Mikkelson and Hugh Dancy and their mindf**kery.”

IGN: I feel like it’s going to be a combination of both!

Fuller: I hope so!

IGN: You, Hugh and Mads are now all working on new projects but as you just mentioned, the love for Hannibal runs deep both from the people who made it and the fans. So right now, obviously nothing is certain, but what do you feel at this moment? Do you think one day there will be a continuation of this world?

Fuller: Well, you’re asking somebody who can see it. I can see that story. I can see it very vividly and I can see it in a new, redefining of the roles of Hannibal and Will Graham. So I feel like it is alive whether it’s just a ghost in my machine or if it’s an actual thing that’s going to manifest in reality. I still feel the reality of that in my heart so it’s hard for me to answer with any objectivity.

IGN: You mentioned doing Silence of the Lambs, and everyone is very curious how this version of Hannibal would deal with that. Were the rights issues with that book and the characters still an issue to be dealt with when you got there?

Fuller: We were going to re-address it if we had got a green light on Season 4 because Season 4 didn’t involve Silence of the Lambs, but it would allow us to grease the wheels and start preparing for a Season 5, so we were going to ask again. So who knows! Who knows how these rights things will pan out and is there a possibility of Starz, in a year from now, saying, “We would love to do a Silence of the Lambs miniseries” and being able to work it out with the rights holders. Who knows? I certainly love working with Starz on American Gods and I would love to do a Hannibal miniseries of sorts.

IGN: I don’t think many would argue with that! Since you mentioned American Gods, can you mention briefly your approach on that?

Fuller: It’s interesting, because Michael Green and I are taking a similar approach to adaptation that I took with Hannibal in that we are taking the iconography of the book and translating it to the screen and also taking suggestions of iconography from the book and expanding them in ways that there was simply not the real estate to explore in a novel whereas when you’re telling a television series that hopefully will go many, many years. So we’re planning it out accordingly that the first season is actually a very small part of the novel because we’ve expanded it in such a dramatic way.

IGN: Will we be hearing some details on that in the not too distant future, you think?

Fuller: Yes and if you buy the current issue of Fangoria, you’ll see exclusive production art from the television series. It’s a good issue. And there’s lots of great interviews with the Hannibal cast. I’m thrilled with it. Having Siouxsie Sioux write a song for the show and being able to guest edit Fangoria, I’m a very happy little piggy

Variety: Bryan Fuller Breaks Down That Bloody Ending and Talks Revival Chances

Spoiler warning: Do not read on unless you’ve seen the “Hannibal” season three finale, “The Wrath of the Lamb.”

Bryan Fuller’s “Hannibal” takes its leave from broadcast television in exactly the same manner in which it entered — full of style, subversiveness and some of the most cinematic imagery ever presented on the small screen.

Even fans familiar with Thomas Harris’ literary works would’ve had a hard time predicting how Fuller and his stars Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy would pull off the climax to Harris’ familiar “Red Dragon” story arc, but the team behind “Hannibal” once again made the material their own by focusing on the complex (but always compelling) relationship between Mikkelsen’s titular cannibal and Dancy’s criminal profiler, ending with a literal cliffhanger that was made a little less cruel (or more, depending on your perspective) by the post-credits stinger that saw Gillian Anderson’s Bedelia Du Maurier back on the menu, reassuring fans that its heroes did survive the fall.

Variety spoke to Fuller to dissect the finale and discuss the show’s revival chances — read on for our palate cleanser.

That finale was one hell of a mic drop. How do you feel, now that it’s out in the world?

It’s surreal. It serves as a series finale when it was designed as both a series finale and season finale, and knowing what would come next in my mind and seeing it very vividly, it’s hard to reconcile the ghost versus the living thing. I’m in a state of surreality, I would say, with it all.

Fans already seem to be speculating about Will and Hannibal’s intentions in that final scene — from your perspective, was Will hoping they’d die from that fall, or planning for them to survive? What was going through his mind in those last moments?

All season long, it had been developing this story of Will’s realization, even as he is going into Europe to track down his friend, that his agenda — as Chiyoh (Tao Okamoto) points out — is “I have to kill Hannibal in order to not become Hannibal.” And he gets so fed up with the machinations of the relationship and Hannibal sawing his head open and trying to get at his brain that he’s just like “f–k it, I’m done with you, I’m walking away.” And yet, as he states in the finale, that was all a ruse to get Hannibal to turn himself in. And so it was kind of a band-aid on a bigger wound, and then when Will is pulled back in to the Red Dragon arc, he’s asking Bedelia, “is Hannibal in love with me?” and Bedelia is saying “is this a ‘can’t live with him, can’t live without him?’” And essentially it is, and that’s sort of the conclusion Will comes to at the end, “I can’t live with him, I can’t live without him. This is the scenario where the least amount of people can die,” meaning, “the two of us.”

I think when Hannibal says, “This is all I ever wanted for you; this is all I ever wanted for both of us,” Will is forced to acknowledge that what they just experienced was actually a beautiful thing. He lingers on that feeling of, “it was beautiful and I will desire it again, and I will be chasing this feeling.” And as he said to Hannibal earlier, “I may not be able to save myself, and that’s just fine.” I feel like we were very honest with the audience in terms of saying exactly what Will does at the end — we said it a few times.

The foreshadowing was certainly delightfully heavy in this episode in particular.

And yet it still feels like a little bit of a surprise at the end. [The stinger with Bedelia] was very intentionally setting up another season of the story.

Speaking of Bedelia, were you thinking you’d want to keep her around, Abel Gideon-style, for appearances in season four, or was that stinger going to be the last we saw of her?

I’m always up for more Gillian Anderson, as much as I can get, however I can get it, so we absolutely would’ve seen what happened before and after that stinger in season four.

As you said, Bedelia and Will actually discussed whether he and Hannibal are in love with each other in the penultimate episode, and it feels like the show spelled out the answer fairly clearly, even if it’s not an overtly sexual love — but where do you think Will lands on that, in the end?

I think that’s what motivates the leap, is his realization that Hannibal was right all along. As beautiful as that felt to him, he understands that it is a place that who he is will not survive in, and so his option is essentially to pull the plug on the whole story, and that’s the only way he’s going to win himself back. It’s a sad gesture in so many ways, and it brings an interesting question to the strength of friendships. In my personal experience, I would say I’ve experienced more hurtful betrayals by friends than I have lovers, and friendships I’ve had in my life have been every bit as intense as relationships I’ve had that have been sexual, so there’s an aspect of that where nothing quite hurts as badly as a friend betraying you. In an infidelity, that type of betrayal between lovers, you understand the human nature and that the heart wants what it wants, and the draw of sexuality and the temptation of that, so you get how human nature is the betrayer in that situation. When it comes to a friend and it’s not about genitals, it’s about the souls, it cuts much deeper.

What’s going through Hannibal’s mind when Will takes them over the cliff?

I think he’s thinking, “Oh s–t, I’m falling!” No, in seriousness, I think he’s feeling that embrace and that’s the first thing that he’s feeling, and even as he’s plunging into the Atlantic, he’s first and foremost thinking about the man he’s holding onto and the man who’s holding onto him.

How did you guys conceptualize that spectacular fight between Will, Hannibal and Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage)?

It was interesting because we did it much, much cheaper and cheerier than we had any other fight sequences in the show … We have spent days on one fight scene before and so much more structured, and there was a lot where we were flying by the seat of our pants in the very last days of production with being over-budget, having no money for relief to do it the way we intended to. So there was a certain catch-as-catch-can quality to the filmmaking.

And the editing process was really interesting, because it was the episode that took the longest to cut because there were so many production issues in terms of not getting what we needed to get to tell the story and not getting close-ups of Richard Armitage for the fight sequence and having to shoot close-ups of Hugh and Mads on stage and then using a sequence that was supposed to go earlier in the episode with Dolarhyde burning his shrine, moving that to the end so we could actually get a close-up of the actor’s face — because we would’ve ended the show without seeing a close-up of Richard Armitage’s face. So there was a lot of “let’s fix it in post!” with the finale, and we added the visual effects of the dragon wings to pump up the volume on the sequence. There was quite a bit done in post to bring that to fruition, because we didn’t have all of the footage to pull it off.

Those final moments were made all the more powerful with that Siouxsie Sioux track behind them — how did that song come about?

Oh my god, I love that song so much! It was something we were trying to get done for many, many, many months. Brian Reitzell had known some of Siouxsie Sioux’s people and I had been such a huge fan of hers — Siouxsie Sioux and David Bowie are kind of like the mom and pop of my musical tastes, I’ve seen her in concert more than any other artists — so for me, the honor of having her write an original song for the show is a career high and one that I’m still on, because I love the song. It feels like a James Bond theme and it’s big and poetic and lyrical and she hasn’t released a song in eight years. We asked and she said, “actually, I haven’t been inspired to write in a really long time, but this show inspires me and so yes, I’ll do it.”

We talked about the love story, that it was a love story between Will and Hannibal and the song should be a love theme, and she wrote “Love Crime.” It’s exactly what the sequence needed, and it was one of those where I had said to Brian Reitzell when I finally finished editing the episode, I was like, “this ending, it’s yours to save, because I think it needs to be better and we really need you to put your magic on it.” And he was like, “well, I just got the Siouxsie Sioux song…” And we had a listening party over at David Slade’s house; David and his wife Erica and Brian Reitzell and I were just sitting there, and everyone just kept pointing to their forearms because they were getting goosepimples and chills from hearing it.

When did you come up with the idea for this finale — was it between seasons, or further back?

It came about halfway through season two and we knew that Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter had to work together to defeat the Red Dragon, and that was a big move forward in their relationship, that the two actually hunt side by side. The ending of the book is not an ending of a season because it just sort of stops and people talk about strange feelings because of it and then they move on and you don’t know what happens but you think, “oh, this isn’t going to go well for the family” and all of that. But we needed something much more impactful and much more intimate, and Steve Lightfoot started talking about Sherlock and Moriarty and Reichenbach Falls and then it was like, “of course, that’s exactly what we need to do, and that murder-suicide for Will is what’s going to define his character and his last heroic act,” and it just felt perfect, so hats off to Arthur Conan Doyle.

It feels like Jack (Laurence Fishburne) should’ve seen all of this coming. From his perspective, did this outcome feel inevitable, or did he actually trust Will’s motives?

I think it goes back to something Jack said to Will earlier in the season, which was essentially, “I didn’t kill Hannibal Lecter because I need you to kill Hannibal Lecter.” I think Jack knew this was a horribly risky endeavor, but I think he also believed he would get what he wanted out of it, which was Hannibal dead and Dolarhyde dead. I think he was open to the possibility that he would lose Will too, and I think it was worth it for him.

Hannibal also made Alana (Caroline Dhavernas) a fairly ominous promise about her future, leading her to take Margot (Katharine Isabelle) and their son and get the hell out of dodge, proving she’s pretty much the only sensible person on the show. Did you foresee Hannibal keeping that promise in season four, or for Alana and Margot to live happily ever after?

It certainly was going to be a part of season four, and I actually was really excited about exploring the Margot/Alana relationship and how they were going to dismantle all of the Verger slaughterhouses and turn them humane. She was going to completely undo the evils of her family with Alana, like a Joan Crawford sitting at PepsiCo’s table saying “don’t f–k with me, fellas.” I was really excited about that story for Alana and Margot and seeing more of them, and also seeing what it would be like for them to realize that Hannibal might be coming back into their orbit.

How are chances of a revival looking at this point? Have you put a pin into it until after season one of “American Gods” is done, or are there still active conversations?

Martha De Laurentiis is investigating financing for a feature film and there’s any of a number of scenarios. Shows have come back years after they’ve been cancelled, and I’m never saying never because … as creatively daunting as it would be to tell that fourth season of Will and Hannibal’s story, I’m very excited by that challenge. If I’m terrified by something creatively, because I fear my ability to pull it off, that inspires me to work harder in order to accomplish it. So I’m inspired by it and I’m inspired by Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy as my partners on this show. That final exchange between Hannibal and Will, Hugh and I wrote that while we were talking about what the scene should be. I was like, “It’s very simple, it’s Hannibal saying this to Will…” and Hugh was like, “and Will would say ‘it’s beautiful,’” and I was like, “I’m just writing this down now and we’re gonna film that.” I miss that collaboration and I would love to engage in it again.

Finally, anything you would like to say to the fans as we close the NBC chapter of “Hannibal’s” story?

Yes, I’m very careful to talk about how this is the NBC series finale. [Laughs.] I will try but I don’t think I’ll be able to accurately articulate my appreciation for the enthusiasm of this fanbase that has taken this show, made it their own and created parallel worlds of fan fiction to this work of fan fiction — because that’s very much what this show is. I feel like it was a unique experience of myself as a fannibal, writing the show as I imagined it — it was my fan fiction — and then sharing it with other fan fiction writers who then elaborated on it in their own ways. It was a wonderful communal experience. I’ve never had a show in the thick of the Twitterverse like I did with “Hannibal,” and it was a really fantastic, exciting experience, and hopefully one we’ll be able to repeat on “American Gods.”

What did you think of the “Hannibal” season three finale? Share your reactions below.