Fans of TV’s Hannibal series may advocate for Mads Mikkelsen’s portrayal, but when people hear the name Hannibal Lecter, they think of one performance in particular: Sir Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. It was the role that won Hopkins the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor despite his mere 16 minutes of screen time. The character’s roots began long before Hopkins’ portrayal however, with author Thomas Harris said to have been inspired by Alfredo Ballí Treviño, a polite Mexican surgeon-turned-murderer who “could package his victim in a surprisingly small box.” This figure inspired Harris to create Lithuanian cannibal Dr. Lecter, who justifies his actions by killing the rudest members of society. Hopkins even called the character the “Robin Hood of killers” for this reason.
Harris’ first book to feature Lecter was 1981’s Red Dragon. The book was adapted by Michael Mann in 1986’s Manhunter. It starred Scottish actor Brian Cox in the role of Hannibal, who based his performance on the real Scottish serial killer Peter Manuel. In 1988, Harris followed it up with a sequel titled The Silence of the Lambs, which followed fresh FBI Agent Clarice Starling who seeks an imprisoned Lecter’s insight as she hunts the mysterious Buffalo Bill. Jonathan Demme directed the screen adaptation in 1991 which starred Jodie Foster as Starling and Hopkins as Lecter. The enormous success of this entry led the Welsh actor to return for the adaptation of Harris’ third installment Hannibal, as well as another adaptation of Red Dragon. He turned down a narrator’s role in the prequel story Hannibal Rising, however. But what was it about Hopkins that made his performance so iconic? In short, it was largely improvised.
Hannibal Making Fun of Clarice Wasn’t in ‘Silence of the Lambs’ Script
Image via MGM
So much of The Silence of the Lambs is iconic by now, with lighting-in-a-bottle details burned into the zeitgeist. It’s hard to imagine that so many of those moments were not intricately planned. In her Masterclass episode, “Jodie Foster Teaches Filmmaking,” the actor-director recalls specific moments from her own career to relate to the lessons learned throughout her development. In one lesson, Foster recalls a Silence of the Lambs scene in which Lecter makes fun of her character’s accent. “That was not rehearsed,” she tells her students. “That was just something Anthony Hopkins came up with.” But his decision was more layered than one might assume. Much like Lecter himself, Hopkins was mining for insecurities in his collaborator’s psyche in order to gain the higher status and establish control.
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“I was an actress learning how to speak in a West Virginia accent, and when I heard him make fun of my accent, it really made me mad,” she laughed. Hopkins’ Lecter brought genuine feelings of offense to Foster’s performance as Clarice, in no small part due to the genuine vulnerability felt by the young actress in real life. In the movie, Foster’s character is a newly-qualified FBI agent whose youth, gender, and overall inexperience make her particularly vulnerable to Lecter’s manipulation. Despite him being in a cell, he maintains all the power within their dynamic, and this choice fueled the subtext of her response. “It’s an interesting thing that happens. I think that you can really feel that. You can feel this kind of shame of having tried so hard to be something and having somebody humiliate you, and not being able to do anything about it because you’re smaller, more fragile, and you’re scared.”
Anthony Hopkins Also Improvised Hannibal Lecter’s Hiss
Image via MGM
Perhaps most famously, Anthony Hopkins also improvised another now-iconic moment in The Silence of the Lambs. During a close-up in which Hannibal stares into the audience’s collective soul, the character recalls, “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.” Although that’s where the line ended in Ted Tally’s screenplay, that’s not where the quote ends when fans impersonate the famous villain. Hopkins followed up the sentence with a bone-chilling hiss on an inhaling breath, implying the character still savors the memory of his victim’s flavor. The decision to include this unsettling sound at the end of this line serves as a form of shocking punctuation, ending the story with a bang, and instilling the same fear in the audience that Clarice feels in the scene.
His unpredictability, as fueled by his improvisation, contributes to the character’s fear factor. It’s techniques and charatcer quirks like these that likely led to the awards’ success with the film. To this day, The Silence of the Lambs still remains the only horror film to win the coveted Best Picture award at the Oscars. It would go on to inspire a sequel, two prequels, and the previously mentioned NBC television series from Bryan Fuller called Hannibal. But that’s not where the story ends in Anthony Hopkins’ imagination. In fact, the character was so ingrained in the actor’s mind from having played the role for over a decade, that Hopkins even improvised an idea for his character’s demise that he wrote into a screenplay that was never actually made.
Anthony Hopkins Wrote His Own Version of Hannibal Lecter’s Death
Image via MGM
During the quick turnaround of 2001’s Hannibal and 2002’s Red Dragon, screenwriter Ted Tally spoke about the longevity of the character as played by Anthony Hopkins. “If Tony Hopkins ever held out, the movie would start in a plastic-surgery clinic in Brazil, and when they took the bandages off, he would probably look like Michael Caine or Kevin Spacey.” He said of producer Dino De Laurentiis, “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Dino’s wife and fellow producer Martha, however, stated, “If you don’t have Tony Hopkins playing Lecter, ultimately a movie could be made, but a totally different movie. Maybe set in another time, 20 years earlier, establish a much younger time frame, a much younger actor.” In fact, that’s exactly what happened, with Gaspard Ulliel in the role of a young Hannibal.
Although he turned down a narrator’s role in Ulliel’s 2007 prequel Hannibal Rising, Anthony Hopkins was not entirely finished with the character. Hopkins revealed he had written his own finale in the form of a screenplay. Returning to his personal roots of the character, The Silence of the Lambs, the film would have climaxed with a final scene in which Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling shoots the cannibal to death in her own home. “I did write a screenplay of my own, just as an exercise, that would follow Hannibal,” said Hopkins. “I showed it to Dino and to my agent and the studio. It’s about Hannibal actually out there, after Hannibal. The final dénouement. Clarice is having a nervous breakdown and living in San Francisco. Then the nightmares start. She sees him on street corners, and he vanishes in the crowd. Then one night she wakes up in her bedroom and she’s handcuffed to her bed, and he’s in the corner smoking a cigar, and he says, ‘Hello, Clarice.'”
The Big Picture
Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs is considered iconic, winning him an Oscar despite only 16 minutes of screen time. Hopkins improvised key moments in his performance, including making fun of Clarice’s accent and hissing during a memorable line. Hopkins even wrote his own screenplay with a finale that included Clarice shooting Hannibal to death in her own home.