Hugh Dancy thinks of ‘Hannibal’ as fine dining

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.”

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.”

Graham was introduced by Harris in his 1981 novel “Red Dragon,” and Dancy reports that he turned to the book more than to either film version for his inspiration.

“Thomas Harris created this complicated character of Will,” he said. “I wasn’t worried about the fact that he already existed on the page. If anything, I think that’s helpful. I had a blueprint for my performance written by a great writer. I used the novel as a launch pad.”

In a separate interview, series creator Bryan Fuller said that Dancy was the perfect actor to play Graham.

“The character of Will Graham is burdened by his own neuroses and personality disorders,” Fuller said. “He could come of as unlikable unless you have an actor who kind of invites you into his vulnerability with those neuroses and with those personality disorders.

“Hugh, as an actor, gives you permission to care for him, as opposed to being someone who just pushes people away. He does throw up barriers as social defenses. Hugh allows you to love him even though he is so buttoned up and damaged as a character here.”

The audience knows, of course, that Graham eventually will catch on to Lecter’s secret and bring him to justice – how it happens is the first scene of “Red Dragon” – so the $64 question for “Hannibal” is, when will Graham catch up with the audience? It seems like it can’t happen before the end of the show, since Harris establishes that Graham’s discovery of Lecter’s evil leads to his resignation from the FBI. Can the show really put off Graham’s realization indefinitely without making him look clueless?

“Clearly there is movement toward that discovery,” Dancy said, “because I’m playing one of the world’s greatest detectors of serial killers. If I don’t start to suspect Hannibal, then at a certain point you’d start to wonder how the (heck) I got the job.”

So will Graham figure things out soon?

“At the same time,” Dancy said smoothly, “Hannibal is the most quick-witted, intelligent man around. He’s always that one step ahead. So, yes, there may be moments when a little alarm seems to go off.”

Dancy is in no hurry to shake things up, though. He’s relishing the show as it stands.

“I get to work every day with Laurence and Mads,” he said. “It gives me so much pleasure, and that’s a feeling I also come away with at the end of the day.”

“Pleasure” is, of course, a hard word to use with “Hannibal,” which is nothing if not violent and disturbing, even within the constraints of a network series.

“The violence weighs very heavily on Will as a character,” Dancy said. “I have to respect that and treat it honestly and make it real. At the same time, the type of violence is operatic on this show.”

He is quick to disagree with critics who have suggested that “Hannibal” and Fox’s serial-killer drama “The Following” have kicked network violence to a new level.

“I think violence, in a broad way, has been on television for quite a long time, perhaps in a more desensitized way,” Dancy said. “I’m not going to start naming shows, but there are plenty of them where you casually learn about how this person was cut up, how this person was raped and so on.

“Madness is not as new as we’d like to think.”

Dancy was born in Staffordshire, England, and was raised in Newcastle-under-Lyme in a thoroughly nontheatrical family: His mother worked in academic publishing and his father was a philosophy professor at the University of Reading. Nonetheless, their son grew up wanting to act.

After graduating from Oxford University, he made his television debut in “Trial & Retribution” (1998), and went on to guest shots on such British series as “Dangerfield” (1998), “Kavanagh QC” (1999) and “Cold Feet” (1999) while also building a career onstage.

Dancy made his film debut as D’Artagnan in “Young Blades” (2001), scored his first hit in “Black Hawk Down” (2001) and since then has been seen in “Martha Marcy May Marlene” (2011).

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