The popular show centering on Hannibal Lecter heads into the third season and star Hugh Dancy talked with Collider about the Thomas Harris book, the Red Dragon attack and what lies ahead for Will in Hannibal season 3.

Dancy says they didn’t enter the second season with a full picture of the story. “I think it fully came into shape for Bryan about half-way through the season. He had so little time to prepare the full season that he pretty much approached the first seven episodes as a separate entity,” Dancy tells Collider in the June 10 interview.

” When we broke over the Christmas holiday, I spoke to Bryan and that was when he told me, ‘Look, I think we’re gonna have Hannibal cut you open.’ At that point, I wasn’t clear about the full extent of the carnage for the other characters, but I knew that he was going to cut me open, as he does in Red Dragon, the novel. And I thought, ‘Okay, great.'”

Dancy is a student of the source material, understanding what’s ahead for Will, Hannibal and the show.

“I was confident that Will would survive. Of all the characters that are bleeding out in that house, Will is the only one who we know from Thomas Harris’ novel that that actually happened to in the source material, and he comes back from it. And I just know that the story between the two of them isn’t finished. At the very least, there’s a third act there. We know that Hannibal has to be behind bars, at some point, and we know that Will has to get him there. It wouldn’t make sense, any other way. So, I feel like I have a few more months in me.”

There’s already a lot of fan speculation on Will chasing down Hannibal.