Hugh Dancy, one of the stars of the gory and violent television series "Hannibal" is talking about his character Will Graham's journey in the third season of the show. When season two closed, Will was last seen bleeding on the floor after being hit by his psychiatrist-turned-enemy Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who has now fled the country with his own psychiatrist Bedelia du Maurier (Gillian Anderson).
So what has become of his character now? In an interview with Variety, Dancy said that Will's current emotional state is "not great." However, his mental wellbeing has actually improved.
"There's an eight month gap before he then takes off after Hannibal, and my feeling was that he goes after Hannibal knowing that he has to do it, but almost choosing not to worry why he's going or what he wants to find when he gets there and what he wants to do. He's in a much clearer mental state," he revealed.
Now that he is operating outside of the FBI without Jack and the rest of the team, it's definitely a challenge for Will to pursue Hannibal, but the actor believes it's a journey that he must make for himself.
"He'd already stepped so far outside of that world, albeit furtively in the last season as he drifted closer and closer into orbit with Hannibal, that I think being cut open, in a way, released something from him," he said. "He's now, in a zen way, accepting the need to go on this quest without needing to know what he's going to find at the end."
Dancy is pretty impressed with how show creator Bryan Fuller played with the time element in the third season, with the first episode showing Hannibal and Bedelia in Europe, then for the second episode they jump right back eight to nine months where havoc was created in the doctor's kitchen.
"To me, that was Bryan doing really interesting things with time, and the way I felt about it was that he was writing in a way that reflected what happens when people go through trauma, which is that they relive that moment," he said.
Dancy believes that the third season's ending will be somewhat similar to last year's "grand and grandiose" finale.
"What I do know is what Bryan has described to me of a potential next season, which seems so interesting and so different and like a really interesting, long story to play out. But no matter how final it feels at the end, certainly if the powers that be signed off on it, there's another chapter, at least," he said.
