The show may have been off the air for over a decade now, but Mads Mikkelsen is still holding out hope for a fourth season of NBC's Hannibal.
Reporting from the Hannibal reunion panel at Seattle's Emerald City Comic Con 2025 this weekend, which reunited Mikkelsen and Hannibal co-star Hugh Dancy, Popverse confirmed that the most recent iteration of everyone's favorite cannibal psychiatrist has no interest in imagining an end for his character:
“Why would we want to see an ending? We want to see it continued,”
The final season of Bryan Fuller's gory series, which aired from 2013-2015, ended in a bloody cliffhanger as Mikkelsen's Hannibal and Dancy's long-suffering Will Graham took a romantic tumble off a cliff and into the ocean after a grisly showdown with the Tooth Fairy killer Francis Dolarhyde (played by Richard Armitage).
At the panel, Mikkelsen stressed that he thinks Hannibal and Will survived the fall, and that any new season of Hannibal would need to take into account the years passed since the last episode:
“Obviously, there’s no way at least Hannibal’s not going to survive that. Of course, he’s going to survive that, and so is Will. It’s just a question of how much we jump in time because if we do a jump of six or seven years, it can be very interesting what these guys are doing now. So, I don’t want to see an ending, I want to see a fresh start.”
A fourth season of Hannibal has been talked about since NBC cancelled the show in 2015. Due to various rights issues between Netflix and Amazon, the series has yet to be revived, but official conversations have been going on behind the scenes since 2017.
In a 2019 interview with Bloody Disgusting, Mikkelsen revealed that he thinks a fourth season of Hannibal could be set to adapt perhaps the most famous story in the Hannibal universe, The Silence of the Lambs:
“I know that [Fuller] was working to get the rights to Silence of the Lambs so he could get in there and use some of those characters for his own universe. I have a hunch that might be where we’re going.”
Given that Thomas Harris' 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs takes place five years after the events of Red Dragon and the reign of terror of Dolarhyde, the timing could work out pretty perfectly. As Popverse correctly point out, Dexter is soon set to return with a new sequel season decades after the original series wrapped up, so it's definitely not beyond the realms of possibility that Hannibal could take a leaf out of that book. It's television, after all; stranger things have certainly happened.
Fuller and Mikkelsen are also set to reunite soon with the upcoming horror feature Dust Bunny.
Look out for more on a potential fourth season of Hannibal as we get it!
