NBC’s critically acclaimed and long-wrapped “Hannibal” continues to find new audiences this month thanks to its inclusion on Netflix, and so those involved are talking it up again.
Showrunner Bryan Fuller recently spoke with Collider and revealed that it took a months long fight for him to cast Mads Mikkelsen as Dr. Lecter in the series. It was a casting choice Fuller wanted from the get go, but he got a lot of pushback from the network who wanted a more familiar face for American audiences:
“There was a casting kerfuffle on who to cast for Hannibal Lecter, and there was a difference of opinion on what a traditional television network would want as a leading man and what we would want as an actor playing Hannibal Lecter to personify playing that character. I think the network wanted somebody that was much more poppy, much more mainstream, much more American I think in some ways.
There was some resistance to Mads Mikkelsen because he was European, because he was somebody who you could look at and go, ‘Yeah I buy that he eats people’. We were dealing with a very American network that wanted a very American actor to sell to American audiences, and all the creatives on the show wanted somebody who was the best person for the role.”
Fuller says he understands their reasoning as it was them trying to get the biggest potential audience for their show, so they suggested several very mainstream names including Hugh Grant and John Cusack. He says offers were made and all turned it down, so Fuller kept suggesting Mikkelsen.
This went on for 3-4 months until finally NBC’s Jennifer Salke said “Okay, that’s your guy. I believe you and trust you and I’m excited about your vision for the show.”
However as a result of the casting, Fuller says NBC’s marketing department “sort of gave up” on the show and so their investment in the series became dramatically decreased. That ended up being a huge benefit as Fuller says it “allowed us to do a lot of things that we wouldn’t have been able to do [otherwise]” because the show then didn’t need to hit large numbers and so they weren’t “tied down to certain parameters of storytelling”.
Mikkelsen ended up being “the gift that allowed us to tell the story the way that we wanted to tell it” and he ultimately went on to great acclaim in the role while the series manage to produce three seasons and score notices for being like “nothing else on television”.
Head over to Collider for the full interview.
