Hannibal Characters: Who Is Who in Every Film

The main Hannibal characters in the films are Dr. Hannibal Lecter, three FBI investigators who keep coming back to him (Clarice Starling, Will Graham and Jack Crawford), and a different killer or villain in each story. Because the saga has five films, the same name often belongs to several actors, and that is the first thing to sort out. The release order is laid out in the hannibal movies in order guide, and the full film list sits on the hannibal movies hub.

No, these are the film versions, played by the actors in the five films. The NBC series Hannibal and the CBS series Clarice are television, and they carry their own versions of these names. On NBC, Mads Mikkelsen plays Lecter, Hugh Dancy plays Will Graham, Laurence Fishburne plays Jack Crawford and Caroline Dhavernas plays Alana Bloom. Bedelia Du Maurier is another series character with no film counterpart in the five movies. Alana Bloom and Bedelia Du Maurier never appear in the cast lists of the films, which is why searches for them lean so heavily to the series. If you searched for Hannibal characters by season, the hannibal tv series page is the place to go, and hannibal lecter books vs movies covers the wider comparison with Thomas Harris's novels.

Hannibal Lecter is played by four actors across the five films, and he is the only character who links every story. He is a brilliant psychiatrist and a killer. Brian Cox plays him as Dr. Hannibal Lecktor, spelled with a k, in Manhunter 1986, directed by Michael Mann. Anthony Hopkins plays him in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), directed by Jonathan Demme, in Hannibal 2001, directed by Ridley Scott, and in Red Dragon 2002, directed by Brett Ratner. Gaspard Ulliel plays him in Hannibal Rising (2007), directed by Peter Webber, with Aaran Thomas as the younger Hannibal. In Hannibal (2001) he lives in Florence under a false name as an art scholar, and in Hannibal Rising he is a boy in 1944 Lithuania.

The investigators are the people who pull Lecter into each case. Clarice Starling is an FBI trainee played by Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs and by Julianne Moore in Hannibal (2001), where she is an agent blamed for a drug raid that goes wrong. Will Graham is a retired FBI profiler who nearly died catching Lecter, played by William L. Petersen in Manhunter and by Edward Norton in Red Dragon. His wife Molly is played by Kim Greist and then Mary-Louise Parker.

Jack Crawford, the senior agent who recruits them, has three actors: Dennis Farina in Manhunter, Scott Glenn in The Silence of the Lambs and Harvey Keitel in Red Dragon. If you are searching for jack crawford silence of the lambs, that is the Glenn version, who sends Starling to interview Lecter.

Each story has its own threat. Francis Dolarhyde is the killer the press calls the Tooth Fairy, and he works at a film processing company. Tom Noonan plays him as Francis Dollarhyde in Manhunter, and Ralph Fiennes plays him in Red Dragon, where he believes in an alter ego called the Great Red Dragon. His blind coworker Reba McClane is played by Joan Allen and then Emily Watson.

In The Silence of the Lambs the hunted killer is Jame Gumb, better known as Buffalo Bill, played by Ted Levine. His latest victim, Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith), is the daughter of Senator Ruth Martin (Diane Baker). Mason Verger, played by Gary Oldman, is the wealthy and badly disfigured man who survived an attack by Lecter and wants revenge in Hannibal (2001). Ray Liotta plays Paul Krendler, and Giancarlo Giannini plays the Italian inspector Renaldo Pazzi. In Hannibal Rising the gang leader is Vladis Grutas (Rhys Ifans), alongside Lady Murasaki (Gong Li) and Inspector Popil (Dominic West).

Several supporting characters turn up in more than one film. Dr. Frederick Chilton is played by Benjamin Hendrickson in Manhunter and by Anthony Heald in The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon. Freddy Lounds, the tabloid reporter who writes about the Tooth Fairy case, is played by Stephen Lang in Manhunter and by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Red Dragon. Frankie Faison plays Barney in The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon. Kasi Lemmons plays Ardelia Mapp in The Silence of the Lambs.

The female characters with the largest roles are Clarice Starling, Reba McClane, Molly Graham, Catherine Martin, Senator Ruth Martin, Lady Murasaki and Mischa Lecter, Hannibal's sister, played by Helena-Lia Tachovská. The male characters include Lecter, Graham, Crawford, Dolarhyde, Gumb, Verger, Krendler, Chilton and Lounds.

The recasting comes down to the saga being told out of order, and in my opinion it changes how each character reads. Manhunter and Red Dragon tell the same story, the hunt for the Tooth Fairy, eighteen years apart, so Graham, Crawford, Dolarhyde, Lounds, Chilton and Reba all appear twice with different faces. Placing the two side by side is the quickest way to see what a director does with a character. Mann gives Lecktor one prison scene with Cox and keeps him in his cell, while Ratner opens Red Dragon with the 1980 struggle in which Lecter nearly kills Graham and then returns Hopkins to the cell. The Dolarhydes differ in the same way: Noonan's Dollarhyde is a lonely lab worker whose tentative romance with Reba carries the film, while Fiennes plays a man at war with the Great Red Dragon tattooed on his back.

It could be argued that Lecter is the one character who survives the recasting, because Hopkins carries him through three films and each of them ends with him free or waiting in a cell. Starling is the opposite case. Foster plays a trainee finding her footing, and Moore plays an agent already sidelined by the Bureau, so the two performances describe a character ten years apart rather than a repeat. Paradoxically, the youngest Lecter is the hardest to place. Ulliel's version in Hannibal Rising ends the film settling in Canada and then the United States, which leads straight into the older man the other films show.

If you want to see which films handle these characters best, the hannibal movies ranked guide gives a verdict. For every credited actor and the crew, the hannibal cast page has the full list.