Watch: Hannibal Lecter: Three Actors, One Mutating Identity

Who’s your Lecter? A more serious question than it might seem, posed in this excellent montage by Matthew Morettini. Morettini has taken the three people to play Thomas Harris’s famous villain–Brian Cox, Anthony Hopkins, and Mads Mikkelsen, in chronological order–and interwoven their portrayals around a famous scene in which profiler Will Graham goes to interview Lecter about a serial killing. The idea behind the scene is clear; the characters are not so much talking to each other as dancing around each other, each man trying to find out how the other man ticks, neither man getting an entirely satisfying result, both men heading off into the abysses of their own selves after the conversation is over.  In this survey of Michael Mann’s exploration in ‘Manhunter,’ Brett Ratner’s exploration in ‘Red Dragon," and Bryan Fuller’s examination in ‘Hannibal,’ we see three faces attached to one rotting core, all saying something slightly different when interrogated–not different in the words they say, but in the way they say those words, which ends up making all the difference.