How The Cast Of The Silence Of The Lambs Should Really Look

While Thomas Harris' 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs might not have been the first appearance of Dr. Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter (that honor goes to Harris' 1981 chiller Red Dragon), it was the Lecter story that properly caught the world's attention. Adapted by Jonathan Demme in 1991 into an Academy Award-winning film starring Sir Anthony Hopkins as Lecter and Jodie Foster as Special Agent Clarice Starling, Harris' book lodged firmly in the collective unconscious as one of the scariest ever written. 

Featuring not one but two serial killers, one who helps find the other, The Silence of the Lambs was a unique crime procedural, especially as it followed a young woman protagonist into painfully dark territory. Thanks to Demme's classic movie, we have the characters' physical appearances stuck in our heads. But how did Harris originally write them? Here's how the cast of The Silence of the Lambs should really look.

The Dr. Hannibal Lecter described in the novel is a far cry from the one we see in the film. For starters, "Dr. Lecter's eyes are maroon and they reflect the light in pinpoints of red." Sir Anthony Hopkins' eyes are bright blue. Harris' Lecter has the same wiry strength as Clarice Starling in a lithe dancer's body, small white teeth that hardly suggest his cannibal tendencies, and six fingers on his left hand. Lecter wears a white standard-issue hospital jumpsuit, in contrast to the blue he wears in the film, and he has extremely pale skin that offsets the red of his mouth. "He's a cemetery mink," Clarice thinks. "He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart," a poetic description to match the overwhelming sense of darkness Clarice feels every time she looks into his eyes. 

One of the biggest changes the film makes to Lecter's appearance is the mask he wears when meeting Senator Ruth Martin: Harris describes a hockey mask covering Lecter's face, a detail the production changed thanks to another franchise about a serial killer, Friday the 13th. Also, the book details the start of Lecter's facial surgery after his escape: Lecter injects himself with silicone to change the lines of his face, and by the end of the novel, he wears surgical tape over his nose until his surgeries settle in.

While Clarice Starling and her colleagues know that Jame Gumb (Ted Levine), aka Buffalo Bill, is likely a white male with considerable physical strength, the first sighting of him in the book is by his victim Catherine Martin, who notes, "The floor lamp lit his face from below, distorting his features, but she could see his body plainly. He had on pressed khaki trousers and [...] chamois shirt, unbuttoned over a freckled chest. His chin and cheeks were hairless, as smooth as a woman's, and his eyes only pinpoint gleams above his cheekbones." Catherine notices that his shirt has hairs all over it, and he smells bad. 

Harris describes Gumb as, "thirty-four, six feet one inch, 205 pounds, brown and blue, no distinguishing marks," the last of which is changed in the movie to a number of tattoos and piercings over his body. He has broad shoulders and a naturally deep voice and "slightly budding breasts" from the hormones he's taking. In the book, electrolysis has changed his hairline into a widow's peak, whereas in the movie, he's wearing a wig of a victim's scalp. In the novel, Gumb often wears infrared goggles to see his moths in the dark as well as a filmy silk house robe, details that the movie has maintained. Demme's version has also left in the same dance and dialogue that Gumb performs in the film as he pretends to be a woman.

As Clarice Starling's roommate and best friend Ardelia Mapp, acclaimed director/actor Kasi Lemmons is one of the few characters who looks very much as she is described in the book: "Mapp's broad, brown, eminently sane countenance was one of the more welcome sights of her day," — sentiments that perfectly come across in Lemmons' Ardelia onscreen. 

However, unlike movie Ardelia, book Ardelia has a tendency to fall into the accent of her youth just as Clarice does, and Ardelia often ribs Clarice on this. The movie leaves out Ardelia's low-income background that also corresponds to Clarice's while still going into great detail about Clarice's upbringing. In the book, Mapp has large, dark eyes and is not as athletic as Clarice. She's the brains of the duo and helps Clarice not fail out of school after her encounters with Lecter and Buffalo Bill. Some of this is included in Ardelia's brief moments onscreen in Demme's movie.

During the course of The Silence of the Lambs and beyond, Hannibal Lecter has only one true ally, the hospital orderly Barney. Barney is kind and accommodating of Dr. Lecter in a non-patronizing way and eventually goes on to be a huge character in Lecter's larger arc. In Harris' novel, Barney is described as "the big impassive orderly" who has a "high and hoarse voice" that reminds Clarice Starling of Aldo Ray, an Old Hollywood actor of television and film fame. Barney has huge hands, and at one point, Clarice sees him reading Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility when she visits Lecter. 

Clarice also comments on Barney's "enormous calm," a vibe that onscreen Barney actor Frankie Faison captures perfectly, even if his voice isn't as described with Faison's singular deep growl. Outside of the hospital, Barney wears a lumber jacket that Clarice notices makes him look even more massive, and he carries his lunch in a pail. Similar to Hannibal Lecter in the book, Barney has small teeth that Clarice sees as baby teeth.

In Demme's version of The Silence of the Lambs, the role of the DOJ's Paul Krendler as written by Thomas Harris has become a composite of a number of different characters featured in the book whose characters were not named onscreen. While Krendler would go on to be played by a smarmy Ray Liotta down the line in the franchise, Demme's casting of Ron Vawter actually follows Krendler's description in the book. 

"Krendler's bald spot was tanned and he looked fit for forty," Harris writes. "Starling had a chance to look Krendler over as he was closing the bedroom door. His suit was a triumph of single-needle tailoring and he was not armed. The shine was buffed off the bottom half-inch of his heels from walking on much deep carpet, and the edges of his heels were sharp." Krendler only appears briefly in The Silence of the Lambs accompanying Ruth Martin as she meets Lecter, but in the book, he is with Senator Martin as they meet Clarice Starling in Catherine's apartment.

We meet Sergeant Pembry and Lieutenant Boyle in Memphis, two of the officers in charge of monitoring Hannibal Lecter in his new digs as he awaits Senator Martin's transfer. In Harris' novel, he describes Pembry as small and Boyle as large. Boyle has liver spots on his hands, and Pembry's arms are heavily tattooed. While Clarice Starling has her unauthorized visit with Lecter, Pembry and Boyle read a Guns and Ammo magazine at Pembry's desk, which also contains riot batons and a huge can of mace. 

The men are "calm and careful" and speak to Lecter "in low, civil tones close to his ears as he was examined." Pembry and Boyle were both exceedingly polite with Lecter, and Pembry even goes so far as to call him "brother" in a short-lived moment of camaraderie. As we all know, Lecter uses these two officers to stage his escape, and the murder and mutilation of Sergeant Boyle happens with the baton just as in the movie. Lecter poses as the faceless Pembry, also like in the movie. However, Lecter does not hang Boyle and grotesquely display him from the cage as seen in one of the most disturbing images in the film.

With the discovery of a new Buffalo Bill victim, Crawford brings Starling on the road to do a preliminary body examination. Starling finds herself in a hostile environment as the only woman other than the one on the slab and fights to remain professional. 

She's accompanied by local coroner Dr. Akin (Kenneth Utt), who Harris describes only as having a nervous tic of tapping a pen against his teeth. Sheriff Perkins is described as a stressed out, small man, which didn't translate to screen, with actor Pat McNamara standing eye-to-eye with Scott Glenn.

Funeral home director Lamar is perfectly cast in character actor Tracey Walter, as Harris describes Lamar with "a whiskey bloom in the middle of his face" and a quirky personality that comes across both in the book and onscreen (though he only wears glasses in the movie). In the book, he has gentle "organist's hands" and is the only one in Elk River who acknowledges Clarice's observational and other skills with the dead body. In the movie, though, Lamar's quirkiness is played rather creepily, and he makes Clarice even more uncomfortable in that terrible situation.