Many actors have replaced others in iconic roles. Count the James Bonds, Batmans or Supermans among major franchises. But usually when it's identified with a singular performance, neigh an Oscar, replacing the actor is trickier. When producers wanted to go with young Dr. Lecter in Hannibal Rising, they sought out a younger version of Sir Anthony Hopkins. Gaspard Ulliel won the role, through no small chain of command.
Gaspard Ulliel On Playing Young Hannibal
"The first meeting was with one of the producers, the French producer, Mr. Tarak Ben Ammar, and he came to me in a dinner in Paris and he just talked about this project," recalled Ulliel. "I was very excited and also very surprised that he came to me for this role. Then I met Dino De Laurentiis and they insisted on the fact that I should meet Peter [Webber] because I was hesitating to accept the project after reading the script because I was very scared I think. I knew that it was very risky for me to go into this project because it’s so popular and I knew that there would be a lot of expectations on this film. So I met Peter in Paris and he asked for some proper auditions so we worked on three different scenes of the film and we worked for two full hours."
There's a little bit of license, being young Hannibal, but there also had to be elements of Hopkins' speech patterns. "Then you know I’m French so for me it was very difficult to get those subtle ways of speaking. Of course I tried to work on a special way of speaking, but then, you know, for the audition I have to admit that I watched Silence of the Lambs and I observed Anthony Hopkins the day before. But then, well not on the set but before shooting the film when I prepared the role, I think I didn’t want to try to copy or imitate Anthony Hopkins so I tried to work on my own with some readings and other films and obviously I knew that the audience would look for some similarities with Anthony Hopkins so one part of the preparation was to observe Anthony Hopkins but the idea was more to just pick a few details in his performance and then add it to my own character."
Hannibal Rising
Hannibal Rising
Those details? "Well, it’s very subtle. There are a few things that you can clearly see in Silence of the Lambs, for example, all the eye movement and the blinking and also his stillness can be very scary sometimes. If you watch precisely every scene, the character is always in a very relaxed, comfortable position. So it’s just a few things like this. It’s nice to have this to create your character but you know this character is very different. He’s much younger and he hasn’t experienced all the prison and the killings so I was just trying to keep these ideas in mind and those images from the other films with Anthony Hopkins but I was not trying to give this back to the audience in my performance because this would have been too much because my character is just a young kid and he’s not as crazy as the older Hannibal Lecter."
Meeting Hopkins was on the table, but could not be worked out. "I discussed this with the producers and they said that they would organize a meeting with Anthony Hopkins and me but he was not available at this time and we couldn’t manage to do it. Anyway I don’t think it would have been helpful for me because I think every actor has his own way of working and I don’t know if Mr. Hopkins would have told me how he is working on his character. I don’t know if he wants to reveal that kind of stuff."
The prequel explains how young Lecter became a murderer and cannibal by taking vengeance on all the SS soldiers who killed his sister in World War II. It could be argued that he is the good guy of this story. "You can’t say he’s a hero, I think. The idea was to try to give him a more human aspect and to try to show to the audience that at the beginning he was just a regular young boy and that slowly he became what he is and what everybody knows he is. I don’t think that the goal of telling his past is to try to justify his killings or to give reasons. It’s just to show how he became like this and not why he became like this. So then, yeah, you can maybe think he is a hero but it’s maybe a bit too much to say this."
Hannibal Rising opens this Friday, February 9th.
For full synopsis and more movie info, go to the Hannibal Rising Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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