Bryan Fuller on Hannibal and Will’s romance, regrets not filming their kiss scene

“Hannibal” creator Bryan Fuller recently talked to “Entertainment Weekly” about Hannibal and Will’s romance, and the show’s grasp of this relationship.

He said he regretted not doing at least one kiss scene between the two, and revealed that Hannibal’s best “confession of love” line was inspired by “Avatar”.

Fuller said there were no plans to write a Hannibal and Will love story in the first place.

“At first it was an obsession with ‘how two straight men interact in a romantic, non-sexual way’ and I didn’t want to distort Thomas Harris’ characters because they were obviously more heterosexual in the novel, but Sexuality became more fluid in the process, as with children today.”

The apparent sexual tension between the two male protagonists led Fuller to consider making the show a love story.

He said it was a guide for the actors’ performances, helping them filter the love out of the lines, writing lines like “Has Hannibal fell in love with me?” “Are you hurting for him?”

Another line was inspired by “Avatar”: Fuller considers the season two finale “Mizumono” to be the single most important benchmark in Hannibal and Will’s romance.

Because of the approaching FBI, the two were about to run away, but… In the end, a heartbroken Hannibal looked at Will in the pool of blood and said, “I let you know me – see me, and I give you a rare gift. , but you don’t want to.”

“see me” comes from Fuller’s feelings about “Avatar”. In the film, Na’vi’s “I see you” phrase means “I understand you, I accept everything about you” in their culture.

And Fuller believes that one of the key points of love between Hannibal and Will is that “Will and Hannibal are the only people in each other’s lives who really understand him, see through him, and accept him.”

So he translated the sentence “James Cameron integrates beautiful fragments of humanity into alien culture”.

“See me is the best ‘love statement’ Hannibal can make,” Fuller said.

“Hannibal” once used a metaphor to express their love, but since this episode, in the third season, things have changed.

Especially in the latter part of the season, when the relationship between Hannibal and Will was repaired, what was previously a “subtext” really surfaced.

Fuller also revealed that the explicitness made writer Don Mancini happy, and the line, “Did Hannibal fall in love with me?” made the writers feel that “it’s finally no longer a suggestion and a metaphor, and finally it’s literal, saying it.”

“It’s the stories and the characters that tell you who they are and what they want to be,” Fuller said. “That makes me happy. That’s how Hannibal and Will are. It’s the characters and their stories that tell us: they’re in love.”

At the end of the whole play, the blood-soaked two fell off a cliff in each other’s arms.

Fuller described: “I love the way Mads plays Hannibal, a heartbroken antihero, and that makes love so powerful in season three because his broken heart is so well healed – they’re together, they share Food, a murder, that’s the pinnacle of turning sexual energy into action, covered in fluids from the body…yes, that’s pretty gay.”

Fuller also confirmed that Mikkelsen’s previous statement that “he nearly kissed Hugh Dancy in that scene” was true, and he regretted not doing at least one real kiss scene between the two.

“There were several shots of that scene, but there was never a real mouth-to-mouth kiss, but there was one where Mikkelsen’s lips were open and he hovered over Will’s mouth for a while. It feels like eternity.”

He said he didn’t want the love story between the two to be predictable, false and forced, and hoped that it would be natural.

“In that moment, I didn’t know if their physical relationship could go beyond hugging each other, and hugging each other, leaning on each other, looking deep into each other, it felt more real and romantic than a kiss.”

But if we could do it all over again… Fuller said: “If it’s going to be done again, I might suggest adding a kiss and see how it goes. But the two actors were never afraid to shoot that step. If there are concerns , the only thing we worry about is ‘is it real’. Of course I want them to kiss and punch the material (laughs), but I really want that moment to feel real, and the handling of the scene in the feature film is also the most real and balanced Yes. But if I could get back into the editing room, I might do something different.”