Crime Show Casting Replacements You Totally Forgot About – Looper

NBC’s “Hannibal,” based on the bestselling novels by Thomas Harris, was unlike any show on network television. Baroque, gorgeous, and gruesome, series creator Bryan Fuller (“Pushing Daisies,” “Star Trek: Discovery”) crafted a bloody thriller for three seasons that was beautiful to watch, even if you were watching through your fingers. Centered around haunted FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and his psychiatrist, the erudite gourmet Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), the series follows Graham’s attempts to catch various serial killers and protect his own fragile sanity, while Lecter works to keep Graham and his FBI boss Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) from discovering that he is a brutal, cannibalistic killer himself.

Season 2 works in elements from the Harris sequel novel “Hannibal,” introducing meatpacking heiress Margot Verger (Katharine Isabelle) and her sadistic, incestuous brother Mason, played by Michael Pitt (“The Dreamers,” “Funny Games”). Hannibal punishes Mason, not just for his abuse of Margot but for his general impoliteness, by drugging him and forcing him to mutilate and eat his own face. In Season 3, Verger returns for revenge, paralyzed from the neck down and his face horribly disfigured; the actor underneath the prosthetics is not Pitt, however, but actor Joe Anderson (“Across the Universe”), as Pitt declined to return to the role after Season 2.