Cox reflected on the different performing styles in an interview with the website Den of Geek years later, comparing the role to Hamlet or Lear in terms of the spin an actor can put on it. “I start the scene with my back to the audience, so I can pull them in. I’m trying to seduce the audience in an entirely different way. Whereas Tony’s there, he’s an indefatigable force,” he said. “It has immense theatricality, and it’s powerful. The only thing that went wrong—and this has absolutely nothing to do with Tony, because I think his performance was tremendous—was the franchise element.”

That Lecter inspired a succession of gory, R-rated crime thrillers is a peculiar anomaly in American cinema. Ridley Scott's Hannibal (2001), which charts Lecter's adventures in Italy after escaping FBI custody, made $350 million worldwide despite featuring multiple disembowelings, a villain being devoured by ravenous boars, and another being spoon-fed his own brain by Lecter. Brett Ratner's 2002 adaptation of Red Dragon, which beefed up Lecter's role considerably to turn it into a more convincing prequel, took $209 million, and Hopkins apparently wrote another sequel himself to try and keep things going, but it was never filmed. The actor’s relish for the role is a huge part of Lecter's charm—here's a man who can’t wait to deliver his next creepy one-liner—but it ended up softening the character almost beyond recognition.

In his early appearances when he’s behind bars, Lecter represents a tricky but fascinating endeavor: to try to understand the motivations of the intelligent psychopath. Graham and Starling use him as a sounding board for insight into the killers they’re chasing, while contending with Lecter's own inscrutable ambitions. Hopkins’ theatricality in the role succeeds partly because the audience knows he's up to something—but once he's out in the world, he's dully superhuman, dodging every effort by the cops to re-capture him and simplifying his relationship with Clarice into a rather formulaic romantic obsession. A final attempt to add humanity to the character came with 2007’s Hannibal Rising, an ill-advised origin story that starred the French actor Gaspard Ulliel in the role, and was a critical and financial bomb.

The challenge NBC's Hannibal faced before airing even a second of footage was ducking out of the long shadow of Hopkins’ performance. Pitched as a prequel to Harris’ books, the series (developed by Bryan Fuller) focuses on Will Graham's (Hugh Dancy) early days at the FBI consulting on various serial killer cases, with the help of Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), a refined Baltimore psychiatrist. Keeping to the character's Eurocentric casting traditions, Mikkelsen is a Danish thespian best known for playing the villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, and he brings similar restraint to Lecter, helped by the fact that the character is still hiding in plain sight from the FBI. There’s no boasting of eating a census collector’s liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti. There's barely even a hint that Lecter is up to no good at first, as he helps Graham take down a killer nicknamed the Minnesota Shrike. Mikkelsen hardly lets his Lecter smile, let alone monologue—this is a cautious, impeccably dressed shark of a man, lurking on the sidelines, analyzing the perfect moment to strike in secret.

NBC

Such a reboot could sound improbable, given Hopkins’ titanic performance in the role. Why would viewers want to watch a prequel about a serial killer they already know is guilty, especially since Mikkelsen barely lets him have any fun onscreen? Much has been written about the twisted morality of the show, which is shockingly violent for network TV (one reason, perhaps, for its relatively low ratings and summer timeslot), and seeks to invest its viewers in a man described as a “pure psychopath.”