Race totally matters. Race totally changes your point of view. It's a different experience.

Everything was so designed by Hannibal to break down Will in the first season, until Will's sanity became questionable. It's so much easier to believe that somebody losing their mind is capable of terrible things than it is to consider Frasier Crane, a charming, fun doctor who invites you to dinner. If you put those two in a police lineup, you're going to pick the guy who's melting down.

It's a neat experience to go from the blank page to an actor elevating it to the audience understanding it - the full life of that is why I became a writer.

I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.

Red Dragon's my favorite of the books, because it is written with such a poet's ear. Whenever it gets really flowery and poetic and it's dialogue, chances are that's a Thomas Harris quote of some kind that's kind of been repurposed or reinterpreted or re-imagined somehow. That's where a lot of that poetry comes from.

I've never been one of those to kind of like, 'I want somebody to do something against their nature to titillate me.' That never holds any interest. And I always want people to be who they are and if they're being not who they are I feel like it's false and, therefore, less easy to connect to. I don't need them to kiss or to display physical intimacy. I think that almost becomes too obvious. I love playing in the suggestive.

Looking back, it's funny how the lighter family-friendly version of these classic Universal movie monsters that were satirized in The Munsters seduced me like a gateway drug into the genre.