"You make me vulnerable"

Given the source material, given what you can’t take out of the Hannibal Lecter story without having it not be Hannibal Lecter anymore, was there a way you could have done this show that would have made it more of a mainstream success?

Bryan Fuller: Absolutely. I think there were many more commercial approaches we could’ve taken to the material. It would start with casting. We cast Mads Mikkelsen, who’s a brilliant actor, but he’s foreign, and perhaps to some mainstream audiences a little bit hard to understand with his accent. If we had cast James Spader in that role, [or] if we had cast Hugh Grant, [we would have] played much more to the pop-cultural understanding of Hannibal Lecter as a character that had become camp in some of the later films. To the flourishes in the later performances of the role. There was a broadness that contributed to his mass appeal, because people were like, “Oh, he’s funny. He says Oh, goody when he’s about to gut somebody. That’s cute.” It’s an approach that’s also glib and a little dismissive of the subject matter, and that probably would have been a much bigger hit. But I think that version would’ve been inauthentic. And fortunately for us, NBC didn’t force us to take that path.