Anthony Hopkins may be the most famous Hannibal Lecter, but Brian Cox will forever have bragging rights to being the first. Decades before Succession elevated the veteran British character actor to pop culture icon, Cox played Thomas Harris’s cannibalistic psychiatrist in Manhunter, Michael Mann’s 1986 chilling adaptation of the author’s blockbuster novel, Red Dragon.
“It was a great role, because it was a very simple role,” Cox tells Yahoo Entertainment now. “What I loved about Hannibal is that he was understated, never overstated. That’s what made him so mysterious, because you think: ‘Who is that man?'”
Cox’s Lecter — or “Lecktor” as his name is spelled in Mann’s movie — is all the more mysterious because he’s such a small part of the story. As in Red Dragon, Manhunter‘s main antagonist is Tom Noonan’s terrifying serial killer, Francis Dollarhyde aka the Tooth Fairy, who bites his victims after killing them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Tooth Fairy is a fan of Hannibal the Cannibal’s work and tells him so in a letter that’s now in the possession of Will Graham (William Petersen), the retired FBI profiler who finally ended Lecktor’s murder spree and nearly lost his life in the process.
Brought out of retirement to find this new killer, Graham pays a visit to Lecktor’s prison cell for an expert consultation — much like FBI trainee Clarice Starling will later do in Red Dragon‘s sequel, The Silence of the Lambs. Jonathan Demme directed the 1991 film adaptation of that novel, which offers a strikingly different interpretation of the character. Cox’s version is coiled and almost antiseptic, his madness just barely masked by cold logic and the bland sterility of his surroundings.
“It’s so clinical,” the actor says of how that scene was shot. “[Cinematographer] Dante Spinotti used all that clinical white light, which I loved because it’s a clinical film. So much is inferred, and I think inferring is more important than declaring.”
In contrast, Hopkins declares Hannibal’s madness when he took over the role in Silence of the Lambs, which departs from Manhunter‘s clinical aesthetic. (The two movies were produced independently of each other, and share no connection apart from Harris’s novels and the Lecter character.) Lurking in a dungeon cell straight out of a Universal horror movie, the actor’s Grand Guignol theatrics plays the audience like a grand piano. Small wonder that Hopkins won a Best Actor statue — despite only having a Guinness World Record-setting 16 minutes of screentime — and went on to make his own Lecter trilogy with 2001’s Hannibal and 2002’s Red Dragon.
“Tony is a genius actor and he took the role, ran with it and did the whole nine yards,” Cox says of the difference between their two takes. “That’s not my approach — I don’t work that way. I think when you overstate [the role] you slightly devalue the character. It’s a risky choice.
“It’s not invalid that Tony does that,” Cox adds, making it clear that he’s not criticizing Hopkins’s approach. “It’s great, and he got the Oscar and all of that. It’s kind of like Hamlet, you know? We’ve had so many people play Hannibal now — Mads Mikkelsen did it, Gaspard Ulliel did it. I don’t feel possessive about roles; I let them go.”
Reflecting on Manhunter nearly 40 years later, Cox says the key to his portrayal of Hannibal the Cannibal was dialing into the character’s “internal mechanisms” rather than his outward madness. “He’s somebody who plays mind games, and mind games are about being in the mind,” the actor explains. “He’s intimidating because of his intelligence.”
“I look at that scene now, and I see how great Billy Peterson is in it,” Cox adds. “He’s so scared about how he’s going to approach this man.” Hey, at least Graham is smart enough not to challenge Hannibal to a round of “Boar on the Floor.”
Manhunter is currently streaming on Prime Video with a MovieSphere subscription and can also be rented or purchased on Apple TV and Vudu.
