Gillian Anderson is Hannibal Lecter’s Therapist

Gillian Anderson has spent a long time away from American television. Her roles since The X-Files have included Miss Havisham and the Duchess of Windsor, and she’ll always have a place in my heart for subbing the voice of Moro, San’s adoptive-wolf-spirit-mother in Princess Mononoke, but the fact remains that she hasn’t had a role this side of the pond since 2008’s The X-Files: I Want to Believe, and hasn’t graced our small screens since 2002.

But if there already weren’t enough reasons to be interested in a series about Hannibal Lecter from the guy behind Pushing Daisies, Gillian Anderson joining the show is a nice addition.

And Anderson won’t be playing just any role in Bryan Fuller‘s new series. For a multi-episode arc, she’ll be playing Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist (the show takes place before Lecter became a notorious serial killer and was simply a famed forensic psychologist). Said Fuller:

Every therapist needs their own head examined and we are ecstatic that Gillian Anderson has chosen Hannibal to mark her return to American television after 10 years to portray Dr. Lecter’s personal psychiatrist. Her intelligence and sophistication, not to mention her pedigree of ground-breaking TV, make her the perfect actress to match wits and psychological manipulations with one of the greatest villains of pop culture. I couldn’t be more excited.

If a bit of IMDB trivia is to be believed, it’s an irony that Anderson is up for a role in a Hannibal series now, since she was prevented from replacing Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling in 2001’s Hannibal movie due to a clause in her X-Files contract that forbade her from playing another FBI agent. Lecter himself will be played by Mads Mikkelsen, and other castmembers of the show include Laurence Fishburne, Eddie Izzard, and Gina Torres. So basically I guess it’s time for me to start paying more attention to it.

(via Entertaiment Weekly.)