Mind Over Motive

Consider the breadth of duties Hugh Dancy must perform as Hannibal’s FBI profiler, Will Graham.

On his very first day on set, he had to analyze a crime scene in which a young woman’s head was mounted on a stag. By that afternoon, the script called for him to wash a dog. Which was more difficult?

“It turned out not as easy as you think,” he quips of the shampoo session with the hyper pooch.

Now, as the NBC hit launches season three, the Brit definitely has a tolerance for the gruesome. What he’s found to be more challenging — and gratifying — are the scenes played opposite Mads Mikkelsen, as psychiatrist–serial killer Hannibal Lecter. The two probe their suppressed interiors like a theater coach and his acolyte.

“It still surprises me that you can do this on television,” Dancy marvels.

The appeal is perhaps not surprising, given that his father was a professor of philosophy. “I get to sit opposite Mads and knock this fantastic dialogue back and forth and really build something unusual.”

Across his career, Dancy has moved nimbly between the stage and screen. A big break came in 2006, when he nabbed an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of the Earl of Essex in the HBO miniseries Elizabeth I, holding his own opposite Helen Mirren as her young lover.

While Hannibal’s mind games and murder come at a price for Dancy’s character — he ends up institutionalized at the end of season one — the actor was able to share intelligence with his real-life wife Claire Danes, whose CIA agent Carrie Mathison, of Showtime’s Homeland, also wound up in a mental hospital.

“It was helpful to talk to Claire about what it’s like to play a character who is losing their mind, or fears that they’re losing their mind,” he says.

Perhaps, a Graham-Mathison pairing is exactly the type of interagency cooperation needed to bring down the most cunning TV villains. “If there were some kind of hideous terrorist serial-killer mash-up,” Dancy offers, “we would be the team you’d want.”