Anthony Hopkins Recalls How He Approached the Role of Hannibal Lecter

Speaking at the Red Sea Film Festival in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, Anthony Hopkins explained how he approached the function of Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Hopkins recalled that when his agent, Jeremy Conway, told him he was sending over the script for “The Silence of the Lambs,” the actor “thought it was a children’s fairy tale.” But he had read just 10 pages of the script, when he phoned Conway to say, “This is the best part I’ve ever read. It’s only very small part, but I know how to play him.”

When requested how he wished to play Lecter, he answered, “I want to play him as a machine. He’s an intellectual genius, trapped in a psychotic form where he has absolutely no feeling for humanity. He has compassion, but no sense of humanity. I’m not well versed in psychology, but I do believe that he’s psychotic.”

Hopkins explained how he approached the scene when Lecter meets Clarice Starling for the first time. “I remember we were setting up, and the director said to me, ‘When Clarice Starling comes down the corridor, how do you want to be seen? Asleep or having a meal or something?’ I said, ‘I want to be standing right in the center of the cell, because I can smell her coming down the corridor.”

Hopkins in contrast Lecter to Mephistopheles in J.W. von Goethe’s “Faust.” “He knows the vulnerable part of ourselves, the seductive part of ourselves, and he knows about her cheap shoes, and he knows about her ambition,” he said.

To the delight of the Saudi viewers, he recited his best-known traces in the movie, including, “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti,” with the sucking sound at the end. He explained he had borrowed this sound from Bela Lugosi as the rely in 1931’s “Dracula,” when he sees John Harker minimize himself shaving, and makes the same sound as the blood begins to circulate.

Asked about the restraint he exhibited playing Stevens in “The Remains of the Day,” he talked about that he had been taught an important lesson by Katharine Hepburn, when showing in his first movie, “The Lion in Winter.” She told him, “You don’t have to act. Just be what you are.” Hopkins added, “So the stiller you are, the more compelling you are.”

He then went off on a tangent to criticize actors who mumble. “Young actors tend to mumble. I know they’re trying to do Marlon Brando, but Brando was the greatest technician of all. He understood everything. He was a very smart man, and he knew how to do it.” He recalled a younger actor who mumbled. “I said, ‘You have no career left if you’re mumbling. Your part in this film is to tell a story.’”