There’s a dance to playing foil to ‘Hannibal,’ says actor Hugh Dancy

LOS ANGELES | “Hannibal” may be one of the darker shows on network television, but it doesn’t depress – or scare – star Hugh Dancy.

“The predominant feeling when I go home is, ‘God, this is so great. I get to do this again tomorrow,’” he says.

Never mind he’s playing a cat-and-mouse game with an intelligent serial killer named Hannibal Lecter. “We’re making a show about really well-dressed cannibals,” Dancy says. “Comedy comes pretty easily.”

Even in those scenes of mass murder. “The reality is, you’ve got 35 or 40 naked, sweaty, farty people lying on the floor. When we’d be doing those scenes, we’d heard a stomach rumble and realize at least four of them were asleep. That takes some of the edge off the horror.”

Still, Dancy knows “Hannibal” is traveling in uncharted network territory. Based on “Red Dragon,” the novel that led to “Silence of the Lambs,” it doesn’t mind creeping people out.

“I look at dog videos all day to put me in a happy place to combat where we work,” says Executive Producer Bryan Fuller. “Part of it is stylizing the violence so it’s heightened and not real. What we do on the show is sort of purple and operatic because, if it were real, I couldn’t watch it.”

Dancy – who plays the homicide detective-turned-teacher tracking Lecter – got a range of emotions in the first season.

“That spiral, that progression over the course of the 13 episodes was so well charted out…I knew where I was going. Dark as it may be, it was incredibly fun and rewarding.”

His wife, Claire Danes, went through a similar journey on “Homeland.” At night, the two would compare notes.

“There’s a real insecurity that comes from playing a character who’s on the edge and sometimes going over the edge,” he explains. “We both ended up the first seasons of our shows being institutionalized. It’s like nobody’s trusting us. I’d go home and say, ‘You’ve gone through this. I’m not completely overdoing it, right?’ And she understood. It can be quite a lonely place as an actor doing that. We’re moving very fast in television. You really have to trust that you’re judging it right.”

In the second season, Dancy’s Will Graham is locked in a mental institution accused of Lecter’s crimes.

“He’s incredibly elastic,” Dancy says. ‘He can go off in any direction, so I don’t exactly get surprised. But, by virtue of being a prequel, we kind of know where we’re headed. There’s only so far we can veer off track.”

When Graham discovers he can’t just say, “Hey, Hannibal did it, it wasn’t me,” he realizes he has to find a different way out of his situation. “Will is a very smart guy,” Dancy says. “You’ll see him embrace the side of himself that can be manipulative.”

As an actor, “the worse it got for him, the more I enjoyed it. This season, it’s even worse. So I’ve been very happy.”

The 38-year-old British born star of such films as “Black Hawk Down,” “Ella Enchanted” and “Martha Marcy May Marlene” was drawn to “Hannibal” by Fuller, who clearly explained what he wanted to do with the Hannibal Lecter story.

“I went back and read ‘Red Dragon’ and thought, ‘Oh, hell, what have I gotten into?’ and then I realized he was going to challenge me and push me into difficult place. That’s been the job. And I’m very happy for that.”

Tortured? “It’s just acting,” Dancy says with a smile.

To succeed at playing all of his character’s quirks, “you have to get all the beats right. Filming is quite technical. It’s not like a normal scene.”

Even something as seemingly simple as working with dogs becomes a challenge. “I love that side of Will,” Dancy says. “He’s such a superficially unsympathetic character because he keeps everyone at arm’s length. And then you see him in his home with his dogs and that instantly lets you understand who he is, for real.”

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