The trickiest thing about Hugh Dancy’s series is that everyone already knows its twist ending.
The NBC series is “Hannibal,” after all, and it casts Dancy as FBI agent Will Graham and Mads Mikkelsen as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
Yes, that Hannibal Lecter. The infamous “Hannibal the Cannibal” created by novelist Thomas Harris and famously played by Anthony Hopkins in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) and two subsequent films. The master psychologist who, having turned serial killer, is imprisoned in a maximum-security facility where Graham, Agent Clarice Starling and other officers of the law occasionally turn to him for his unique insights into the darkest corners of the mind.
The twist: “Hannibal” takes place even before “Manhunter” (1986), remade as “Red Dragon” (2002), albeit later than “Hannibal Rising” (2007), which focused on Lecter’s youth. The audience knows that Lecter is a serial killer, but Graham doesn’t.
“We didn’t tell you right away on the show that he is a flesh eater,” Dancy said. “We had a lot of fun feeding that out in little morsels.”
As it were. Speaking by telephone from the show’s Los Angeles set, the 37-year-old British actor is in an antic mood, quick to joke about even the darkest aspects of his latest project.
And why shouldn’t he be? Life is good for Dancy, who is married to actress Claire Danes – who has her own hit series, Showtime’s “Homeland” – and has an infant son, Cyrus Michael Christopher Dancy, born in December. Throw in a highly touted midseason series, and it’s fun to be Hugh Dancy right now.
“It’s a wonderful, busy, tiring, joyful time in my life,” Dancy said. “Now I have a TV show that’s more than enough to keep me interested, test me and challenge me. I jumped right in.”
“Hannibal” explores the early relationship between Graham, the young and gifted FBI profiler previously played by William Peterson in “Manhunter” and Edward Norton in “Red Dragon, and the not-yet-infamous Lecter, who becomes Graham’s mentor before becoming his most famous case. Gillian Anderson and Laurence Fishburne co-star.
“Will is a unique character,” Dancy said. “In his mind he lives with demons, including a great proximity to death and violence. You could say that he’s humanity. Not to make too great a claim of the character, but he carries this violence within him, which I think we all do to some extent.”
