Overview
- Ted Levine, who played Buffalo Bill, said some dialogue and ideas in the film no longer hold up and called its vilification of gender identity “f***ing wrong,” while stressing he did not play the character as gay or trans.
- Producer Edward Saxon said the team saw Buffalo Bill as an aberrant personality rather than gay or trans and conceded they were not sufficiently sensitive to harmful stereotypes.
- The anniversary reports also revisit Thomas Harris’s 1960s encounter with a prison “doctor” in Mexico, later identified as Alfredo Ballí Treviño, whose elegance and menace informed aspects of Hannibal Lecter.
- Investigators and past reporting describe Lecter as a composite drawing on multiple killers, including Edmund Kemper, Ted Bundy, and Issei Sagawa, with additional proposed influences such as William Coyner and Albert Fish.
- Material from FBI expert John Douglas and film features link Buffalo Bill’s tactics to real cases, citing Bundy’s abduction ruse, Ed Gein’s flaying, and Gary Heidnik’s basement pit confinement.