Brian Cox was the first to bring Hannibal Lecter to the screen — years before Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for Silence of the Lambs, decades before Mads Mikkelsen earned a passionate cult following for his TV portrayal, and 32 years before Cox began captivating audiences as Succession patriarch Logan Roy. Cox’s Hannibal Lecter (he was called Lecktor then, for reasons we’ll let Cox explain) was quietly masterful in 1986’s Manhunter, directed by Michael Mann.
Before Manhunter, Cox was drawing rave reviews for his performance in the British play Rat in the Skull, including from New York Times critic Frank Rich, a future executive producer of Succession. In the following excerpt from his brutally honest memoir Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, Cox recounts how the role led him to Lecter. —MM
Who better, then, to play cinema’s first incarnation of Hannibal Lecktor, a serial killer featured in a bestselling novel by Thomas Harris? The film was Manhunter and would be my U.S. movie debut. It came about because my late friend Brian Dennehy had been due to star in the first American production of Rat in the Skull, and so while the show was in New York, he was turning up on a regular basis to get some pointers on the role. He once said to me, “You were mesmerizing, mesmerizing.” And I replied, “Yes, and you were memorizing, memorizing.”
Brian had worked with the director Michael Mann on a 1979 film called The Jericho Mile, and Michael was tapping him up to play Lecktor in his upcoming Manhunter. Brian didn’t think he was right for the role but recommended me, bless him.
At this point, Brian wasn’t the only person in line for the role. John Lithgow was being considered. Mandy Patinkin was up for it, too. However, the next thing I knew, the legendary casting director Bonnie Timmerman had her name down to see Rat in the Skull and she must have liked it, because shortly after that, I was sent some pages of the script and invited to her office to do a tape.
My friend Philip Jackson was playing opposite me in Rat. He’s great. A lovely man. Still my friend. He agreed to do my off-lines for the audition, and together we went to Bonnie’s office where she said to me, “I don’t actually want to see you.”
I looked at Philip, who pulled a face.
“What?” I said.
She said, “No, I want to see you. I just don’t want to see you. Can you turn away from the camera? Can I just hear you?”
“You want me to do an audition not looking at the camera . . .?”
“Yes.”
I did the audition. It was the scene where Will Graham, who was eventually played by Bill Petersen, goes to see Lecktor in his prison cell. As Lecktor, I said, “That’s the same atrocious aftershave you wore in court three years ago.”
“Yeah,” said Phil, doing my off-lines, “I keep getting it for Christmas.”
“Did you get my card?”
“I got it, thank you.”
“And how is Officer Stuart, the one who was first to see my basement?”
“Stuart’s fine.”
“Emotional problems, I hear . . . Do you have any problems, Will?” And so on, and so on, like that. The dialogue was the same as it was in the movie (and, indeed, virtually the same as they used in the remake, Red Dragon, with Anthony Hopkins as “Lecter” — different spelling because of a rights issue, I gather — years later) and I played it just as I played it in the film.
The audition went well.
“So why did you ask me to do it that way, without seeing me?” I asked Bonnie.
“Well,” she said, “I came to see you in Rat in the Skull, but I arrived late and couldn’t get my seat, and so I was sitting where I couldn’t see you. But I could hear you, and it was your voice that really made me think, Wow, this is the voice. This is the voice of Hannibal Lecktor.”
She loved me. She loved the audition. She recommended me to Michael, who saw the tape and that was it, boom, I got the role.
Succession star Brian Cox made his U.S. debut playing the killer psychiatrist Hannibal in Michael Mann’s Manhunter. Anthony Hopkins later played Hannibal in three films.
I didn’t use an American accent. Tony Hopkins, when he went on to play him in The Silence of the Lambs, then Hannibal, then Red Dragon, always played him with an American accent. The trouble was that while not knowing exactly where Lecktor was supposed to be from, I never really thought of him as American, so I just played him more or less with received pronunciation. Maybe a little hint of Scottish crept in every now and then, but that was about it.
The film opened and had incredible reviews. The Los Angeles Times, in particular, went nuts for it, but then the producer, Dino De Laurentiis, went bust so the film went into escrow, which meant he couldn’t get it shown. As a result it became this film that everybody talked about but nobody had seen, until in the end, the British producer Jeremy Thomas got hold of it and released it in the UK, where it finally came out in 1988, perhaps three years after we’d made it, at which point it was already a bit of a cult hit.
Personally, I loved the film. I thought it was great and still think so. The only thing I don’t love about it is the synthesiser score. And I’d loved working with Michael. I’ve never worked with him since, which is a shame, but for me a very common happenstance. There are actors who work with the same director time and again. But, with the notable exception of Michael Elliott, with whom I worked consistently over a period of about fifteen years, I’m not one of them. I’ve worked with a few writer-directors recurrently. Conor McPherson and David Storey spring to mind. But other than that, I very rarely get asked for a return match. I think I probably piss a lot of them off.
People often ask me about my performance of Hannibal, which differs quite considerably from those that came afterwards. As for other actors’ interpretations, I can’t say. It’s the kind of part that everybody will come at from a different angle. I do it one way, Tony Hopkins approaches it another, Mads Mikkelsen and Gaspard Ulliel choose a third way. The nature of the role lends itself to myriad interpretations, like the great classical roles of Macbeth or Iago.
Where I came from was Peter Manuel, a serial killer who had terrified us all in Scotland when I was a kid. Manuel was born in New York of Portuguese extraction but brought up in Glasgow, and he was very ordinary, almost like Peter Sutcliffe in that way. The other person who influenced me was Ted Bundy, who was the exact opposite: very charismatic but with that sort of politician’s charisma. I saw Lecktor as a kind of a cross between those two personalities.
I also played down the psychosis. A chief difference between my portrayal and Tony’s was that Tony played him crazy whereas I played him insane, and there’s a difference between madness and insanity. Tony was scary and very Grand Guignol, but that wasn’t my and Michael Mann’s take. Our take was, this guy is an intellectual. He’s very, very clever. But if you saw him in the street you wouldn’t look twice at him. He wouldn’t stand out for his manners or his clothes or some kind of exaggerated charisma. He’s just an ordinary-looking, sounding and acting guy who happens to have an absolutely razor-sharp brain.
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A few years after I’d done the movie, my agent, Jeremy, called me. He was also Tony Hopkins’s agent. He said, “This script has come in for Tony, but the character is very much like that character you played in that film.”
That was it. That was what he said.
“That character in that film.” He couldn’t remember the name.
“Quigley?” tried Jeremy. “Was he called Quigley?”
This, it turned out — and I’m sure you’re way ahead of me here — was The Silence of the Lambs, directed by Jonathan Demme, with Tony as Lecter.
Anyway, eventually we worked out exactly what he meant, and I must confess to being a bit disappointed, because Thomas Harris had in fact sent me a proof copy of The Silence of the Lambs with a note enclosed, saying, “I hope that one day you’ll do this,” and of course I’d loved the book, I’d loved playing Lecter and would have jumped at the chance to be in The Silence of the Lambs. When I eventually saw it, I confess to being surprised at just how similar it was to Manhunter. The killer guy is different. As is the agent, of course. But the set-up and structure are almost exactly the same.
Putting the Rabbit in the Hat: A Memoir by Brian Cox
Why wasn’t I asked back? Well, firstly because Michael had let go of the property and it had all got very complicated, as these things do. Gene Hackman had been approached to direct it, but he jumped ship. Then Jonathan Demme came on board and of course he wanted to be a new broom. He wanted to do everything in a fresh and original way, and he wasn’t interested in who had played Hannibal first. Directors are like that. They want their own creations. They want their own people on it.
I wasn’t bothered. I mean, I would have liked to do it, but I didn’t lose any sleep over not getting it.
Okay, I tell a lie. One thing that did bother me was the money, because of course Tony went on to win the best actor Oscar for it and when you win an Oscar your salary goes whoosh.
After all, I’d been paid $10,000 to do Manhunter and he made at least a million from The Silence of the Lambs. That kind of disparity is somewhat bewildering. We met during his rehearsals for King Lear, before I had done my Lear and around the same time as I had been playing Lecktor. “So, how’s it going?” I asked him.
“Oh, it’s all right,” he told me. “It’s okay. It’s a hard part. Gambon’s given me some advice.”
“Oh yes?”
“He says all you have to do is stand in the middle of the stage and do a bit of shaking and shouting.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s a viewpoint.”
And then Tony said a very revealing thing. He told me that the other day he had been talking to the director, David Hare, and mentioned that he’d had an idea. Something he’d like to do in rehearsal.
He’d said, “I think I’d like to . . .” and David had looked at him and said, “Oh, you think that, do you, Tony?”
The response brought Tony to a sharp stop. It was the most withering put-down. The school prefect telling the first-year kid off, and it was just . . . horrible. There’s no other word for it. Hare was being an absolute “see you next Tuesday” of the highest order. And I thought at the time, and still think, that is the state of English theatre. That kind of patrician attitude. A terrible way to behave.
And still, although Tony and I have had some wonderful conversations over the years, the one thing we’ve never talked about, and no doubt never will, is The Silence of the Lambs.
Excerpted from the book Putting the Rabbit in the Hat: A Memoir © 2021 by Brian Cox. Available Tuesday from Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
Main image: Succession star Brian Cox made his U.S. debut playing Hannibal Lecktor in Michael Mann’s Manhunter.
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