Hugh Dancy Knows What a Fourth Season of ‘Hannibal’ Would Look Like

Hugh Dance at 2015 San Diego Comic Con
Hugh Dancy at the 2015 SD Comic Con (Photo by Richard Chavez)

Hugh Dancy was in LA for the Television Critics Association’s panel for his new HULU series, The Path, and of course Hannibal was still on the minds of Dancy and the television critics in attendance. Immediately after the show was cancelled by NBC following its third season, there was talk that Hannibal would be picked up by Netflix or some other network. Nothing has come of those talks yet, but fans and the stars of the series are still holding out hope.

Asked if his character, Will Graham, would have taken a backseat to Clarice if they’d gotten to do Silence of the Lambs, Dancy replied, “I don’t believe so. I think, first of all, we didn’t have the rights to Silence of the Lambs. Bryan had pitched to me…not pitched but described to me in a kind of overview what he wanted to do with a fourth season had there been one and it was fantastic. It was really a complete restart in a way without describing it because, who knows, god knows maybe some way we’ll get to do it in the future. I would love that. But it took us back to the first season in a very unexpected way, but made total sense of that cliffhanger ending. I mean, it seemed justified. And it was born out of a part of one of the books so it was still coming out of that universe, but it wasn’t the Clarice part of Silence of the Lambs.


Dancy hasn’t given up on the idea of a fourth season of Hannibal. “I just think that if I keep saying it, it might happen,” said Dancy, laughing. But, he hasn’t heard any recent news about the show being close to being picked up by any outlet. “Not that I know of for sure. I know there were conversations. I know it was complicated for lots of reasons that I was probably like very, very late to the party to know about. The fans honestly were better informed than I was about a lot of stuff. But all I can say is I know that Bryan’s very busy, Mads [Mikkelsen] is busy, I’m busy right now but I know that all of us would, I think, happily come back in the future if we could.”

There were also rumors of a new Hannibal movie, but Dancy says he doesn’t know anything about that. “I think we would be very happy to return in some capacity. I think the idea of a movie is really interesting. Obviously one of the things that we did on the show, Bryan did really, was that very languorous, very image-rich storytelling. How to fit that into a movie, I’m not sure. But as I was saying, the version of a fourth season [Bryan] described to me maybe would work well in that capacity. I just know that I’d like it to happen in the future. It’d be great.”