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Lambs still screaming

Stepping into Jodie Foster’s shoes is never an easy task, but former Home and Away star Rebecca Breeds is more than happy to take on an iconic role, writes Stephanie Bunbury.

Clarice is now available to stream on TVNZ OnDemand.

It is one of the most quoted lines from a cult film, although it never sounds quite as ominously honeyed as when Anthony Hopkins delivered it. ‘‘You still wake up sometimes, don’t you, Clarice?’’ asked the monstrous Hannibal Lecter. ‘‘You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs?’’

Jodie Foster, a small but resolute figure sitting in the jail corridor where he can’t reach her, looks haunted, controlled, compelled and repelled all at once. When she answers ‘‘yes’’, the single word conveys a lifetime’s stoic suffering.

Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is one of just three films in Oscar history to win in the five top categories: best film, best director, best actor, best actress and best adapted screenplay.

When writer Thomas Harris wrote a sequel to the original book called Hannibal, only Hopkins of that original team returned to the franchise. Hannibal was absurdly overplotted, violent and grotesquely graphic, even on the page. ‘‘Tom Harris, as unpredictable as ever, took Clarice and Dr Lecter’s relationship in a direction that just didn’t compute for me,’’ Demme said later.

Ridley Scott stepped up as director; Julianne Moore, an actress of palpable warmth and sensitivity particularly requested by Hopkins, was required to be almost robotic as a driven, dust-dry version of Clarice. The film broke box office records, but reviews were mixed, to put it politely. Even Hopkins said later he should have said no to it, although he was able to put a dandyish new spin on his character while sauteing Ray Liotta’s brain. Clarice watched him cook in a morphine fog, unable to move. Who knows what she was thinking?

It was only a matter of time before this golden age of television seized on the Clarice Starling of Silence of the Lambs as a tantalisingly unfinished story. Subsequent Hannibal films did not include her. The NBC series Hannibal, which starred Mads Mikkelsen, was set to introduce Starling to the story in its fourth series but was cancelled, despite critical acclaim and multiple awards, before it could get there. Last year, trade magazine Variety reported that the CBS network had commissioned Clarice.

The new show opens in 1993, a year after the events of Silence of the Lambs, when agent Starling shot serial killer Buffalo Bill in his grisly sewing room. Still traumatised, but determined not to admit it, she is summoned back to the field to assist her old FBI foe Paul Krendler (Michael

Cudlitz) catch another killer – although, as other cases arise, she has to work on those as well, which means the series could notionally run forever. Does she miss matching wits with the cultivated Dr Lecter? We don’t know; producer Dino de Laurentiis holds the rights to the Hannibal character, so he can’t even be mentioned.

Playing Clarice Starling is a surprise choice: Rebecca Breeds, most familiar to Australian audiences as Ruby Buckton in Home and Away. Seven years

ago, after four years as Ruby, she and her husband and co-star Luke Mitchell decided to try working in America. Both landed ongoing roles in successful series. ‘‘We kind of did it as an exciting adventure; it wasn’t like, ‘OK we’re moving forever and this is everything in life’,’’ she says. ‘‘We were just putting ourselves in a place where there were more opportunities.’’

At the same time, she says, she had an unwavering ambition. ‘‘Two or three years ago, I was doing my affirmations in my journal and I wrote that I wanted an iconic role. I don’t know why, but it was something I would always write down. And now, here we are. . . And I go to work every day and do my iconic role and I feel so at home and so equipped and so ready for this. I don’t feel any trepidation. Finally, we’re here!’’

How did she set about making the role her own? As she says, that isn’t a choice. ‘‘That’s all I can do. I am me, so I can’t do anything other than express this character through the tools that I have.’’

She has taken her cues from the original novel – ‘‘It’s just so rich with her inner monologue, her backstory; it’s an actor’s dream come true’’ – rather than the films. She doesn’t want to find herself copying anyone; only her accent is based on Foster’s, pitched at the same level of West Virginian curliness. ‘‘It could have been dialled up or dialled down, but I love where she placed it – and I wanted her to echo into our show.’’

Clarice’s gruesome, omnipresent backstory though takes its toll. ‘‘I have to be very caring with myself whenever I have time off,’’ she says. ‘‘Selfcare has become like a full-on pastime for me.’’

Not for nothing was Jodie Foster’s Clarice an instant feminist heroine; she grimaced her way through the coldshouldering and careless aspersions by male colleagues as a lone she-wolf bullied by the pack. The new series is coloured by #MeToo; Starling is undermined at every turn.

‘‘A lot of the time she knows for the sake of her job she has to just cop it on the chin,’’ says Breeds. ‘‘But I think she has a lot of fury underneath it all. And I feel the fury when I’m her.’’

She also recognises Starling’s urge to prove herself. ‘‘I think that’s very much something Clarice and I share. He’s going to tell me I can’t do this? Well, watch me. Watch me be stronger, because I’m going to work for it. And not only am I strong in spite of being a female, I am strong because I am a female.’’

Whether the determination shared by actor and character will carry the series is another matter. Reviews out of the

United States have been mixed. Some critics see no point in a sequel to The Silence of the

Lambs that doesn’t include Hannibal Lecter.

‘‘There’s a big problem here. Everything about Clarice has been done, successfully and terribly and constantly, by a whole generation of CBS procedurals,’’ said

Entertainment Weekly.

‘‘Bland, sanitised network drama,’’ said CBR.

‘‘Like one of Lecter’s victims, it seems drained of all vitality,’’ said TVLine.

Breeds’ portrayal, on the other hand, is ‘‘electric’’ and ‘‘immediately charming’’ (TV Guide, US). And The Silence of the Lambs was always Clarice Starling’s story. There is surely a sort of misogyny – sotto voce, of course – in the idea that this story is of no interest unless it’s being teased out of her by a gastronomically non-conforming inquisitor.

Breeds is asking other questions. Does Clarice dance? Does she want a boyfriend? Who is she, as a human? And Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming? Because an old friend would like to know.

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2021-07-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

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