You do a good job keeping the mystery intact during the early episodes. You could go into this show without knowledge of Lecter, Graham and Crawford, and you wouldn't have a clue about what Lecter will inevitably become.
I was always working under the assumption that everybody knew who Hannibal was and so I didn't have to play it and I didn't have to overplay it. What's so interesting about Mads is that, in our first meeting, he told me that he approaches the character less as the darker Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence of the Lambs," incarcerated with the mask, and more like Lucifer, the fallen angel who loves humanity and is in awe of humanity and appreciates the beauty of humanity and punishes those who don't in damning ways. He sends them to hell.