Even though, in the novel, Margot at this stage of the story really should be 6 years old— because when she first was in therapy with Dr. Lecter, she was a little girl, and she was horribly molested, and it was very, very dark—I didn’t want to tell that story, so we generalized the sadism of Mason Verger so it wasn’t a sexual sadism. It was more, this is a bad man who, like Hannibal, gets off on what people do under certain circumstances.
In the novel, she’s a very masculine character, who has had years of steroid abuse and is a lesbian, and it was unclear to me in the novel whether she was either transgender or a lesbian as a result of those horrible abuses and that horrible childhood and [Beat.] that’s not how transgenderism or homosexuality works. So I didn’t want to contribute to that misconception of what it is to be transgender or a gay woman.
It was important for her to have a strength to her and the idea of the reason she’s going into therapy not being because she was this victim of horrible abuse. Which she is, in a different way. She grew up with a sadist, who was incredibly cruel and will be even more cruel in the future, but I like the idea that she’s in therapy because she tried to kill him, as opposed to because she was so victimized, that she had taken an active role in her victimization and had enough, tried to turn it around, and it didn’t go well for her.
I love having a showrunner who thinks like this.