Hannibal Season 4 Would Gender Flip Some Characters According to Mads Mikkelsen

Hannibal star Mads Mikkelsen has been discussing his hopes for a potential fourth season of the show just weeks after its creator, Bryan Fuller, revealed how he would approach reviving the serial killer drama.

In Fuller’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter book series, which was canceled five years ago at NBC, Mikkelsen starred as the titular character alongside Hugh Dancy as Will Graham. The brilliantly deranged show went on to develop an ever-increasing cult following who would frankly love to see everyone’s favorite ‘murder husbands’ back for Season 4.

Mikkelsen opened up about the possibility of reprising his role as Hannibal while promoting his new critically acclaimed Danish-Swedish film, Another Round.

“I don’t think it’s a secret that if it does happen, we would love to go into Silence of the Lambs,” Mikkelsen told IndieWire, though MGM’s refusal to grant Fuller the rights to a Silence of the Lambs-focused story back in 2017 makes pursuing that particular avenue problematic.

“That’s always been an issue because they didn’t have the rights for that book,” Mikkelsen conceded. “But that’s obviously the most famous part and we’d love to go in there. We’d obviously switch it around a little and do all kinds of crazy stuff with it. That story is so interesting and the characters in it are as interesting. We’d switch around the genders and maybe even put two characters into one. We would love to find someone to play Buffalo Bill. That’s going to be tough. We found a Hannibal, so it’s possible.”

Mikkelsen also shared his dream casting for the part of Buffalo Bill, should the show ever get an opportunity to explore the villainous character.

“We already used Michael Pitt for Mason [Verger] and that was fantastic,” he said. “If he wasn’t playing Mason I’d love to see him as Buffalo Bill.”

For Mikkelsen, seems like only a matter of time before he’s back in the kitchen preparing another Hannibal feast.

“The show is becoming bigger and bigger,” he noted of the series’ Netflix streaming success. “The greater the breaks between seasons, the more people become followers.”

During a recent Rolling Stone interview, Fuller pitched Season 4 as “Inception meets Angel Heart.”

“I’d want to play point-of-view in a dramatic way,” he said. “And that means that there’s going to be considerable mind-palacing and obfuscating of reality, or at least the perception of reality. And the thing that I’m most excited about is, because there’s going to be such a mental landscape to explore, that means actors who play characters who have previously died can manifest in the mess of Will Graham’s brain.”

Meanwhile, Mikkelsen acknowledges that the show’s fandom – often known as ‘Fannibals’ – continue to support his career by watching a lot of his Danish output, which he describes as “heart-warming.”

Seasons 1-3 of Hannibal are streaming on Netflix now.