Mads Mikkelsen hints that Hannibal may well be back in a few years with Silence of the Lambs

So we’re still not over the end of Hannibal.

It’s a show that went beyond all expectations and gave us an incarnation of Hannibal Lecter that, we’re just going to say, left Brian Cox and Anthony Hopkins behind.

Now Mads Mikkelsen, Hannibal in the series, has teased that the show may not be as dead as we all feared.

Talking to The Express, Mikkelsen has hinted that Hannibal may be coming back: “It all depends on Bryan [Fuller, the producer and showrunner]. He is the key, the base, the heart. We will wait and see what happens next in his career. But we all know that we can easily pick this up in two or three years, there are breaks in the stories. We could pick it up, say, four years later. If Bryan is up for it, we will all go for it. He loved it. It was his baby. Let’s wait and see.”

Fuller is currently involved in the new Star Trek series as well as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods adaptation, so we reckon the break may well work in his favour: “We are all angry. We were pi#@ed. It’s madness. And season four was actually the one we thought we’d definitely get. Seasons two and three were on the verge. We didn’t know whether Hannibal would be renewed. But by the time we got to season four we thought it was a definite. We were very surprised at the decision. We were happy to be able to do it for as long as we did. However, we felt there were more stories. We thought we ended the show in a great way, but we had more to tell.”

The actor confirms that they almost had all the rights for Silence of the Lambs – there was a legal issue with elements of the story, such as the name Clarice Starling – and had stories to tell. When asked what the stories might be, the actor relied: “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”

We’ll happily wait if it means getting Fuller’s version of Silence of the Lambs… will you?