'Hannibal's' Next Course: The Stars and Showrunner on Season 3 of NBC's Gorgeous Gorefest

There are season finales that leave you hanging… and then there are season finales that leave you bleeding out all over the kitchen floor.

Season 2 of NBC’s Hannibal went out with guns blazing (and arteries spurting), giving us a grandiosely blood-soaked finale that left most of the main characters — Will Graham, Jack Crawford, Alana Bloom, and a resurrected Abigail Hobbs — clinging to life, while ever-elegant serial killer Hannibal Lecter jetted off to Europe with his therapist Bedelia Du Maurier at his side. So is Season 3 (premiering Thursday) just The Hannibal and Bedelia Show? RIP, the rest of the main cast?

Thankfully, no. Since he’s in all the trailers and promotional photos, it’s not exactly a spoiler to say Will Graham will indeed be back on Hannibal’s trail in Season 3 — and that’s just the way Hannibal likes it. “Let’s put it this way,” Mads Mikkelsen, who plays Hannibal, tells us. “If I left Will Graham in the kitchen in the second season still alive, there’s a higher meaning to that.”

So why didn’t Hannibal finish off Will when he had the chance? And why is Will still chasing the man who nearly killed him halfway across the globe? We chatted with Mikkelsen, his co-star Hugh Dancy (Will), and showrunner Bryan Fuller about Hannibal’s strangely fascinating (and fascinatingly strange) central relationship, and what other culinary and cannibalistic delights Season 3 has in store for us.

Through two seasons, Hannibal has been a very delightful surprise indeed. What could’ve been just a cynical cash-grab reboot has instead been one of the most satisfying shows on network TV: beautifully shot, shockingly gory, and eager to delve deeply into the twisted psyches of both killer and profiler. We almost have to remind ourselves we’re watching a network procedural, because we’ve never seen one this challenging, this visually dazzling, this psychologically astute before.

“The approach of the show was always been one of a pretentious art film. And I love pretentious art films,” Fuller tells us. “I think a lot of television on broadcast doesn’t go the extra mile to present an aesthetically pleasing story. Particularly since we’re dealing in the horror genre, which is often dismissed as a B-genre and doesn’t get the respect that it deserves. I wanted to make sure that the tale we were telling is an artful one at every level.”

Related: Ask the Fans: ‘Hannibal’ Showrunner Bryan Fuller Responds to Your Answers

Season 3 opens on an artful note, with Hannibal enjoying life as a European bon vivant, zipping through Paris on a motorcycle and escorting Bedelia to a fancy Italian ball. (As Mikkelsen tells us, “we were forced to go to Florence in the springtime,” his voice dripping with mock exhaustion.) But no matter where Dr. Lecter goes, his taste for human flesh travels with him; in fact, he’s indulging in his bloodlust even more brazenly, to Bedelia’s horror. “I’ve taken off my person suit,” Hannibal calmly announces to her — a chilling thought, indeed.

“The first half of this season is a very different shape than what we’ve seen in the last two,” Dancy says. “And breaking Hannibal off, sending him to Europe for that new life that he’s trying to carve out for himself — so to speak — it kind of makes sense.” And Bedelia makes sense as a traveling companion for Hannibal, too, with a fierce intellect that matches his… though we’re never quite sure if she’s his captive or a willing participant. “She’s a very interesting character in the sense that there’s something we cannot grasp completely,” Mikkelsen says. “There’s something wrong with her… She’s not as sick as I am, but she’s close."

But we do eventually get to see Will Graham recover from his wounds and renew his pursuit of Dr. Lecter. Some of his wounds take longer to heal than others, though. Fuller hints that the episode in which Will returns "is so much a poem to grief, and how Will is navigating the grieving process, as well as trying to find Hannibal by going into his past to better understand him in the present."

So what is it about these two men that they just can’t let go of each other? We learn early on in Season 3 that Hannibal deliberately stabbed Will in a way that left him alive, and Will tells another character of Hannibal, "I don’t know what I’d do without him.” Dancy says that when new directors come onto the show and start discussing the Hannibal/Will relationship, “really quickly, whoever you’re talking to would start talking about the worst relationship they’d ever been in. The awful girlfriend they could never say goodbye to, or whatever it might be. And that is kind of the shape of it.”

“I think Bryan calls it a bromance,” Mikkelsen says, “but it’s on the verge of being…” An actual romance? Mikkelsen stops himself from going there, but does say, “Hannibal is obsessed with him. Mentally, maybe even physically. We don’t know.” Fuller cites the moment in the Red Dragon novel when Hannibal tells Will, “You caught me because you’re just like me,” as an inspiration for the series. “That felt like it was something that needed to be unpacked, and told,” he says. "And in order for that relationship to have power in the mythology, it needs to be irresistible to both Hannibal and Will. That’s the story that we’re telling.“

Related: Ken Tucker Reviews the New Season of ‘Hannibal’

Another story they’re telling in Season 3: the story of Hannibal’s upbringing, as Will travels to Lecter’s native Lithuania to learn more about the man he’s trying to catch. "He’s deliberately seeking out his origins,” Dancy says. “It’s more of a quest, if you like, to understand him. To regain the momentum, or the upper hand, almost. At the end of Season 2, Hannibal says to him, basically, 'I let you see me.’ And that’s half-true. But the fact is, you’ve still only seen one-tenth of the iceberg. Whatever made Hannibal — if you can say that anything made Hannibal — is still there to explore."

But it’s not as simple as pointing to a specific childhood trauma as the key to understanding Hannibal. "We’re not explaining why he is what he is,” Mikkelsen insists. “We’re just telling stories about him. That doesn't explain how he is, and who he is.” (Indeed, as Hannibal says himself in Season 3, “Nothing happened to me. I happened.”) “We don’t delve too deeply,” Fuller says, “because I didn’t want to unmask the man as much as I wanted to create a greater sense of mythology to the character, without overexplaining his youth.”

A number of fresh faces join the Hannibal cast in Season 3 as well: Zachary Quinto appears in flashbacks as the patient Bedelia killed years ago, and The Hobbit’s Richard Armitage will appear in the season’s second half in the much-anticipated role of Francis Dolarhyde, aka the Red Dragon, a heavily tattooed serial killer who looms large in the Hannibal legend.

“When I first read Red Dragon, the thing that struck me was how sympathetic he is in the literature,” Fuller says. “Despite him being a horrible murderer of families, Thomas Harris guides you into his mental state so deftly that you see a man struggling with his insanity. And it’s tragic. There are moments where I’ve been in the editing room where both the editor and myself have tears in our eyes, because his performance is so heartbreaking.”

Photos: Check Out More Pics From Season 3 of ‘Hannibal’

The addition of Dolarhyde this season does represent a bit of a change of plans for Fuller, though; he had originally envisioned a seven-season plan for Hannibal, with the Red Dragon being introduced in Season 4. “I think if you make a plan, you have to be absolutely willing to adjust the plan,” Fuller now says. “Otherwise, it’s just arrogance, that your first idea was your best idea. And I’m not that arrogant,” he says with a laugh.

The new plan combines Hannibal’s European jaunt and the Red Dragon arc into one season, which helped to streamline the storytelling, Fuller says. “We were able to keep the story unfolding in an intriguing way, without having an episode where you’d say, 'Well, you don’t really need to watch that episode to understand the arc of the season, because it’s relatively inconsequential.’ We wanted everything to have consequence.”

And what are those consequences, exactly? We’ll begin to learn that with Thursday’s season premiere. Dinner, finally, is served.

Season 3 of Hannibal premieres Thursday, June 4 at 10 p.m. on NBC.