In Robert De Niro's best movies, he's gotten to play some of the most iconic characters in movie history. There are few characters as memorable as Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver or a young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. However, it turns out that De Niro could’ve played another famous role at one point. The Goodfellas actor recently revealed that Hannibal Lector from The Silence of the Lambs was originally offered to him, and he explained why Anthony Hopkins ultimately played the character instead.
The veteran actor was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, where he chatted with the talk show host about his latest Oscar-nominated project, Killers of the Flower Moon, as well as issues regarding our political climate. Before the conversation turned away from acting, Maher asked the performer about some of his famous roles and if there were any parts he missed out on over the course of his prolific career. While Robert De Niro didn’t seem to have any regrets, he did mention that he was once offered the role of Hannibal Lector. He said:
The only one that I didn’t… I was taking so long to think about it as the famous one that Anthony Hopkins wound up doing. … It was with Jonathan Demme. … Yes, Silence of the Lambs. I could’ve played that part.
Anthony Hopkins feels like the perfect actor for the role in hindsight. But, at the time, wouldn't have exactly been surprising for Robert De Niro to have been offered the role first. The Silence of the Lambs was released in 1991, only a year after Goodfellas, and only a few years following De Niro’s turn as the villainous Al Capone in The Untouchables. The now-80-year-old actor was one of the most bankable movie stars at the time, and a movie villain like Hannibal Lector would’ve been right in his purview. Of course, Anthony Hopkins was well respected in his own right, but you can’t deny De Niro’s star power in the early '90s.
Even with a part that was seemingly such a great fit for the Oscar winner, and an auteur mind like Jonathan Demme behind the project, the Casino icon still had a hard time committing to the film. The Irishman actor ultimately named his indecisiveness as the reason why he wasn’t cast as Lecter. He told Maher:
But I waited so long, and I was thinking. I was like, ‘Just give me a little longer.’ He just cast it. … I don’t regret it. That’s just what happened.
Even though it’s easy to toss around “what-ifs,” his lack of regret makes it seem like he is ultimately content with how everything transpired. The right actor seems to have gotten the part, and Anthony Hopkins has been synonymous with Hannibal Lector throughout his entire career. He won Academy Award for Best Oscar for the role, and played Lector once again for the sequel film, Red Dragon. Ironically, De Niro played another mean '90s movie villain in a film that same year, taking on the fearsome Max Cady in Martin Scorsese’s rewatchable thriller, Cape Fear. Maybe the energy he had in that role is what he would’ve brought to Lector had he taken on the part. We'll never truly know.
Robert De Niro may not have been Hannibal Lector, but he plays a villain just as unsettling in his latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, which you can check out now with an Apple TV+ subscription. The movie made him, once again, an Oscar nominee in 2024, so check it out while you can. Fans of Silence of the Lambs can also revisit the film and see what Anthony Hopkins did with the iconic serial killer role now on MGM+.
