Richard Armitage’s Hannibal Experience: A Conversation in Three Acts – Act I
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Originally posted in All Film website as
Richard Armitage di Serial Hannibal: Perbincangan Tiga Babak – Babak I.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Hannibal S3.

Hannibal the Cannibal finds himself in a quagmire. Entering the second half of its third season Hannibal Lecter (or the Chesapeake Ripper, if you prefer his serial killer name), played by Mads Mikkelsen, has landed himself in prison. Meanwhile, outside the TV show’s universe, Hannibal the NBC show is also in trouble – it’s been cancelled by its American broadcaster, NBC, and has yet to find a new home for its fourth season.

Ironically, just as NBC moved the show to a different, quieter night (originally Thursday night in the US and Friday in Asia; now it’s on Saturday night in the US and Sunday in Asia) and as fans fret over the loss of Dr. Lecter’s sumptuous dinner parties and his next nefarious plan to manipulate Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham from behind bars, the show is unleashing its most epic weapon of destruction ever: Francis Dolarhyde.

The character, same as Hannibal, Will and Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), came from Thomas Harris’ famous novel, Red Dragon. A quick Google search will point out that he’s an iconic one that’s been played twice before. Tom Noonan played him in Manhunter (1986) and Ralph Fiennes in Red Dragon (2002), both of which are feature films. Now Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller has recruited yet another actor for the television series, making him the third to play Francis on screen. But despite being the third, this actor is set to make serial killer Dolarhyde, aka The Tooth Fairy, entirely his own. And his might just be the best; after all, the new Francis is played by none other than Richard Armitage.

We have interviewed Armitage twice before, specifically for his role in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit movies as dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield. We know him from those previous sessions to be courteous, eloquent and incredibly generous with information. There are few other actors All Film loves to interview more than the former Spooks and Strike Back leading man, especially because when we interview Armitage, we can let his own words do the work. Descriptions of experiences on a film set, character development and story arcs are naturally built upon his answers.

Rather than bore you with the details, without further ado, here is what Richard Armitage has to say about the saga of Francis Dolarhyde and the Great Red Dragon. Completely in his own words.


Act I: In the Mind of a Serial Killer



Let’s jump straight into your character in Hannibal, Francis Dolarhyde. This is not the first time you play a cruel character who experiences romance – your character in Robin Hood, Guy of Gisborne, comes to mind. How do you find, as an actor, that balance between cruelty and romance?

It’s interesting that you bring up Guy of Gisborne, because in a way I find Guy of Gisborne more despicable than Francis Dolarhyde. Dolarhyde is somebody who’s experienced such trauma in his childhood and damage at such an early age, not just in his body – from the cleft palate – but in his mind from being abandoned by his mother and abused by his step siblings. I feel like there’s a deformity in him which is causing him to act in this way. For that reason he has my empathy and, to an extent, my sympathy. It’s not that I condone what he does, because what he does is so appalling and, in certain countries, he would receive the death sentence and would be locked up forever in a mental institution. But as a person that became a monster, it’s something I find fascinating to explore. I feel like there are people who walk among us with the same potential damage that need our care, I suppose.

The most difficult thing for me is making it a piece of fictional entertainment. Because initially it was written as a novel, which is – I don’t know – why do people read fiction? It’s an escapism. It’s dark escapism. But the character, he’s just fascinating. If an audience can empathize with him, then it’s kind of a strange achievement.

Going by what you’re saying, it sounds like you believe in the ‘nurture vs nature’ concept. Can you talk a bit about that?

I do in this case. We’re talking about a fictional character, this isn’t based on somebody real as far as I’m concerned, although I think Thomas Harris studied psychopathy when he created this character. But I think in the story of the ‘Red Dragon’, Thomas Harris is pointing the finger in the direction of nurture. I think that is definitely the case. But at the same time I’m pretty sure that there are people out there that have had what one would describe as a perfect childhood and still tread this path. But it’s just in this instance I would say I’d certainly believe it’s about nurture.

At the recent Comic-Con, either you or Bryan Fuller said something about how Francis Dolarhyde was uncomfortable in his own skin. In what ways does that trait manifest in your performance? And it seems like you spend a lot of time without clothing in this series. Is that something also physically uncomfortable for you as an actor or are you used to it?

I’m sorry, I spend time without what?

Without clothes. Because you have to show your tattoo and all that stuff…

Oh yeah! The being uncomfortable in his skin was something which I just… I found it through… it was mainly how Bryan was writing his script. He wanted the tattoo to move, as if the tattoo was coming alive. There’s also the fact that halfway through the book the character sort of separates into two. The schizophrenia really separates his mind, and he starts to hear voices in the attic… although he’s trying to become the dragon, the dragon separates from him. So I felt like that was a man [whose] movement of the tattoo was [something] riding around inside his body. And also Thomas Harris describes him observing his own hands and the crunching of his joints as a sense of him being frightened of age and at the same time to reinforce his body, so all of those things were helping me with that.

As for the no clothing aspect of it… it’s, again, something which Thomas Harris wrote. Francis Dolarhyde spends much of his time in his attic without clothing, and I think it was something to do with him detaching from the human experience, that he didn’t want to feel like a man. He wanted to become an animal. He wanted to become the dragon. A dragon is without clothes, a dragon has a kind of physical armor which is not human clothing. I feel that that was something to do with it. But, yeah, in a way, wearing that tattoo had that effect on me. It didn’t always really feel like being naked.

You once said violence must be portrayed truthfully, and not glamorized or sexualized. In playing the Tooth Fairy, you have to show your bare torso and such. Did you discuss with Bryan Fuller your thoughts on how violence is portrayed? Have your views on violence changed in playing these roles?

That’s why taking on the role is important to me. The conversation is what happens as you film something, so… you know, when you’re asked to portray violence, it has to be faithful to what it really is depicting. If it’s trivalized, then we undersell it. If it’s glamorized, we’re in dangerous territory. You know, I never saw Francis Dolarhyde as a sexualized being. In fact, I find him asexual. He’s never had a sexual encounter with a living woman before – that, to me, was fascinating. So he’s falling in love for the first time [with Rutina Wesley’s character in the show, Reba McClane]. There was a real innocence to him. Yet at the same time he’s committing terrible, terrible crimes against families, and particularly the female of the family.

We never really depicted that on screen; it was something that I was very frightened [to happen]. And if it had been, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I don’t think I would’ve been very comfortable taking on the role knowing we were going to see that. Thomas Harris built that into the writing – the writer describes what the character has done, you don’t see the character doing it, and you understand the character and what the character has done – through his own vision of it, which is slightly distorted.

In the past, you said that you tend to stay with your characters during the filming period. In portraying a serial killer, how does that play out for you did you have to make adjustments?

Staying in character is not really possible when you’re… to be honest, I say with the character. Staying in character on set is easy because you can go into a corner… A lot of the time on set I was working in Francis Dolarhyde’s house or in his attic, so I would stay on set and go into a corner and stay in character. Coming away from it at the end of the day, I saw myself as a kind of student of Dolarhyde. So I would read about psychopathy, I would read the scripts and I would go back to Thomas Harris’ novel, just to remind myself about who he was, his history and his past, and listen to certain music… so in that respect, one steps outside the character and just continues to study during the process.

But it is quite a frightening thing when you accept the things that he does. Especially a character that you are empathizing with… it’s difficult. I remember that there was one day where they were showing the film footage of what he’d done. And I remember being horrified by it… as him, actually. It was very, very difficult to watch.

Continued in Act II.

* Francis Dolarhyde’s story starts on Hannibal episode 8, “The Great Red Dragon, on Sunday, 26 July 2015 and will last until the end of season 3. In Asia, Hannibal is on every Sunday, 9 PM (JKT/BKK) on AXN Asia.

I posted the English version of this unabridged interview with Richard Armitage for the sake of international readers who don’t read Indonesian. You may post this interview and its subsequent parts in your website, but it is necessary to credit me as “Amanda Aayusya/All Film Magazine” and link to All Film’s version (Act 1 in Indonesian) when you post the interview. Otherwise, you can simply link back here. If you want to translate this article into another language, please ask for permission first.

Richard Armitage’s Hannibal Experience: A Conversation in Three Acts – Act II

Originally posted in All Film website as
Richard Armitage di Serial Hannibal: Perbincangan Tiga Babak – Babak II.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Hannibal S3.

Actor Richard Armitage speaks to All Film magazine about his character, Francis Dolarhyde, in Hannibal TV series. Continued from Act I.

Act II: Finding the Beauty Behind the beast

This show is distinctively about Hannibal Lecter’s and Will Graham’s relationship with each other. Francis Dolarhyde is said to be trapped between Hannibal wanting to corrupt him further and Will wanting to kind of save his soul. How do you find this dynamic, and is this something that you feel is true to the original Thomas Harris story?

No… that’s the new element. That, in a way, suspends Dolarhyde appropriately in the existing Hannibal TV series universe. In the book, Dolarhyde is a very standalone character and Hannibal isn’t really… they never really meet, they don’t have very much to do with each other, and of course you can’t play that character in a series that’s called Hannibal [in which] Will Graham is such a featured character. So that is a construct that is designed to place Dolarhyde in a part of the story whereby he can engage with Hannibal Lecter and play against Will Graham.

And it becomes a very dangerous triangle, whereby Will Graham is trying to prevent the next murder happening, and in a way saves Francis Dolarhyde, and Hannibal is pushing him towards the edge. He wants him to become the dragon. He wants to see this kind of extraordinary experiment, this extraordinary becoming that Dolarhyde is attempting. So Hannibal cares less about his violent crime and more about what he’s going to become. And unfortunately the next target is Will Graham’s family, which is actually directly taken from the book. So it’s all informed by the book but that is actually a new construct.

The series have a very specific style of having the characters speak slowly and in layers of meanings. What were Francis Dolarhyde’s dialogues like?

Well, actually, you know, one of the great things about this was that there was very little that was invented outside of Thomas Harris’ novel. Most of the dialogue that I speak is lifted directly from the writing, so I knew what he sounded like and I knew what words he would say. And Harris gives us such great lines. Bryan has a real respect for the writer in this instance, so he takes everything from the novel, really. One of the most difficult things for me was that Harris has Dolarhyde avoiding certain words because of the difficulties that he has [with] speaking the ‘S’ sound as a cleft palate sufferer. So when those words would come into the script, I would have to sort of navigate them. But again it was as the character – he was tripping on those words as obstacles because you can’t avoid the ‘S’ sound all the time, you know?

hannibal-season-3-francis-dolarhyde-02

How did you make this character your own? And what do you say to those who insist on drawing comparisons between you and the previous two actors?

Well, I… I didn’t really study anything that the other people had done. I took everything from the Thomas Harris material and from the script, really, and try to give it my own… to put my own ideas into it, my own ideas about abuse, about the cleft palate, I went in search of examples of children that speak like this and the physical manifestation of the character. It’s my body and it’s my mind creating the character. I don’t know yet whether… until the series has been shown, I would imagine it’s not possible to make the comparison because no one’s actually seen what has happened with that character yet. I mean, it’s interesting how we do jump to conclusions a little bit about character before we’ve actually seen them. So maybe that question will be more relevant… I don’t know if it’s going to be similar to the other characters because I haven’t seen them and I don’t know how it’s going to manifest itself. I haven’t seen the final edit and I haven’t seen the final cut, so it’s all a bit of a mystery to me as well.

Did you follow Hannibal before you joined the cast?

I really didn’t and it’s because I’m a little bit squeamish.

(He chuckles sheepishly a little, rather sheepishly, at this confession.)

I remember being terrified of The Silence Of The Lambs. But I didn’t really follow the television series, [although] I was really aware of it because of the mask thing in the artwork, which I found wonderful. Every season they would produce this extraordinary artwork and I remember it turning my head and thinking, “I really must watch that.” But then coming to it, I’m actually a little bit frightened to do that. When I was going to come into the show, obviously I sat down and watched back to back every episode. There were certain moments that I really had to turn my face away from. As an actor, you open your soul to experiences and I’m a very sensitive person by design – it’s the whole point of being an actor: you feel things, and certain things I just don’t want in my head. There are certain images that, once they play into your mind, I find very difficult to get rid of. I still have images from films that I’ve seen from the past that I wish I’d never looked at.

Now one of the things that come into my mind, that I wish I’d never looked at, is that scene – and I think it’s in the first series but I may be wrong – where all of those bodies are stitched together and one of the men is alive and he pulls himself away [in the opening scene in Hannibal episode 2.02: “Sakizuki”]… it’s like, it’s so horrific that even now as I think about it, my toes and my hands are clenching. I sort of wish I never had that in my head. But ironically at some point in my career I’m going to use that feeling again. I’m going to recall that memory because it’s useful to sort of think that the most horrific thing that makes you tremble is useful. But I prefer to choose how I program my mind…

Continued in Act III.

* Francis Dolarhyde’s story starts on Hannibal episode 8, “The Great Red Dragon”, on Sunday, 26 July 2015 and will last until the end of season 3. In Asia, Hannibal is on every Sunday, 9 PM (JKT/BKK) on AXN Asia.

I posted the English version of this unabridged interview with Richard Armitage for the sake of international readers who don’t read Indonesian. You may post this interview and its subsequent parts in your website, but it is necessary to credit me as “Amanda Aayusya/All Film Magazine” and link to All Film’s version (Act 1 in Indonesian | Act 2 in Indonesian | Act 3 in Indonesian) when you post the interview. Otherwise, you can simply link back here (Act 1 in English | Act 2 in English | Act 3 in English). If you want to translate this article into another language, please ask for permission first.

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Willkommen im Club "Wir-gucken-Hannibal-wegen-der-Verpflichtung-als-FD-und-schauen-bei-allzu-blutigen-Szenen-weg", Richard.

Danke für das Herüberholen des zweiten Teils, Nimue. Ich freue mich schon auf den dritten.

Richard Armitage’s Hannibal Experience: A Conversation in Three Acts – Act III


Originally posted in All Film website as
Richard Armitage di Serial Hannibal: Perbincangan Tiga Babak – Babak III.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Hannibal S3.

Actor Richard Armitage speaks to All Film magazine about his character, Francis Dolarhyde, in Hannibal TV series. Continued from Act II. This is the third and final part.


Act III: Fans and Fullerverse

Bryan Fuller is said to be a collaborative showrunner. Is that what you experienced?

Yeah, I mean, it was one of the highlights of the experience for me. Any ideas I was sharing with him, he absolutely took on board and absorbed into creating of the episodes. But also a lot of the time, we’d email more or less at the same moment, and I would be asking for something at the same time that he was offering exactly the same thing, so we were very in tune with each other. There were very few occasions – I can’t even think of one occasion – where I disagreed with a choice that he was making and everything that I was given to say, everything that I was given to do, or where, just felt completely appropriate. And you know, when  those things were all in place, you can work in a way where you think, “Well, what about if we go here?” and I can jump a little bit higher, I can go further, and so that was exactly what happened.

You joined social media last year. How are you enjoying it? Meanwhile Hannibal has a very huge, loyal and active fanbase in social media. Have you heard from them?

Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons why I think I’m enjoying it is because I know at some point, for me, it will all come to an end. When I’m not an actor anymore,  I will no longer be on social media. So it does have a finite kind of time limit…

But in terms of engaging with fans and talking to fans and, you know, rolling out a television show, I love what the Hannibal writers do and the way that the DeLaurentiis Company works… And the way that Bryan works is that he engages with the fans all the way through the series and you can feel the rise in excitement for the episodes. I feel that it’s really important because television is such a changing medium in the way that people consume it. And the networks are fighting so hard to get the people to sit down at certain time on a certain day and watch, so social media’s the way of doing that. Even though I still feel like it’s failing because, uh, you know, the show is  no longer to be on NBC unfortunately.

Now you’ve done both television shows and films. Hannibal looks like a movie at times. How does it feel to work on a TV show that has a film quality?

It’s one of the reasons why I picked up the phone and just said yes to Bryan. No matter how good an actor is, if they’re placed in a playground that’s poorly made, the actor is reduced to the level of the show. I’ve been in ALL kinds of places like that. You know, I’ve worked on daytime television at times …

(A loud musical noise – like the beginning a song – suddenly starts blaring in the background.)

And I’ve watched that stuff back and I think, “Well, I’m not a very good actor, am I?” And then you get to play in all of the…

(Armitage pauses for a beat due to the sound and then chuckles in confusion, which causes the interviewer to also laugh.)

Uh. What happened?

(He laughs again for a little bit more at the interruption and then jumps straight back into his answer, with great emphasis on some of his next few words.)

Then you get to play in Bryan Fuller’s universe, which is incredibly beautiful to look at, it’s sumptuous, it’s cinematic, it’s lit beautifully, the soundscape is incredible and you just think, “If I could get to work in that world, then my work is elevated.” So I was very excited about that.

END.