Season 1 and 2 spoilers ahead! Only spoilers from Season 3 should be blanked out.
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The Verger Family
Margot Verger
"I'm taking what you promised me, and I've got everything I need from you now."
Played By: Katharine Isabelle
One of Hannibal Lecter's patients, and sister to the sadistic Mason Verger.
- Adaptational Attractiveness: In the original Hannibal novel, she was a husky butch-looking woman. In the TV series, however, she's feminine and slim.
This is stated to be a deliberate avoidance of the Butch Lesbian trope, though she is still a part of the LGBT community. - Adaptational Sexuality: She seems to be genuinely interested in Will despite identifying as a lesbian and claiming she just wants him to get her pregnant. It's likely she's natively bisexual and was simply put off men by growing up with her abusive father and brother.
- Adaptational Wimp: She's far more emotional and dependent on her insane brother than novel counterpart, who made a point of making a living of her own rather than relying on him. When she does turn on Mason, she needs Alana's help and is much less brutally efficient about killing him.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: Her brother Mason attacked her and broke her arm, but her family quickly brushed it off, much to her disgust.
- Broken Bird: She's traumatized and angry after her brother Mason attacked her. And he's been doing it for years.
- Brutal Honesty: Though not rude about it, she has a very blunt personality.
- Cain and Abel: Played with. She tried to kill her brother, but only because he has been abusing and will probably kill her if he feels like it.
- Covered with Scars: Her back is literally covered in scars from Mason's treatment over the years, as Will found out. She later receives a huge scar on her abdomen after Mason forces an abortion and sterilization on her. This was invoked on Mason's part to remind her of what she had lost.
- The Dog Bites Back: She and Alana steal Mason's sperm by stimulating his prostate, and then kill him.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: By the Red Dragon arc, she's still in a relationship with Alana and has a son with her.
- Fascinating Eyebrow: Her response when Hannibal gives her advice about how to kill her brother.
- Gender Flip: In the book she's heavily implied to be wanting to transition, given how she previously took steroids to look more masculine, uses the male shower rooms with Barney, and other characters repeatedly think she wishes she was a man.
- Heir Club for Men: She slept with Will to get pregnant, ensuring she can then kill Mason and keep the Verger fortune. It would default to the Southern Baptist church if Mason dies without a male heir who's blood-related.
- Lipstick Lesbian: One of the reasons why her brother is inheriting the family company and not her, along with her being a woman.
- Pragmatic Pansexuality: Although a lesbian, Margot seduces and sleeps with Will to get pregnant and implies later that she would be willing to entertain a formal family dynamic with Will in rearing their child.
- Revenge: She plays with the idea of killing her brother during her therapy session with Hannibal as retaliation for his years of torment.
- Sex for Solace: In a way with Will. She sleeps with him in order to produce a male heir.
- Stepford Snarker:Mason: Your mouth gets rough when you're scared, Margot.
- Strapped to an Operating Table: After finding out that she is trying to produce a male heir, Mason arranges for her to get into a car "accident" with his henchman so he can take her into hospital and have her sterilized. He explains this plan to her just before the operation as she's drugged and helpless on the table.
- The Unfavorite: Her family considers her "weird" due to her sexual preferences, and was less than supportive after her brother brutalized her.
- Throw the Dog a Bone:
- After years of torment at the hands of her brother, after he'd removed her only means of escaping him, he winds up paralyzed from the neck down with no one to care for him but Margot. And she promises to do so — just as well as he cared for her.
- At the end of season 3 she has Alana, and Mason's sperm to get a new blood-related child to keep the fortune.
- Token Good Teammate: She's this to the Verger family by default, as she's The Unfavorite among them, has a friendly enough relationship with members of the FBI, and the fact that anyone would look like a saint compared to Mason.
- White Sheep: To the corrupt Vergers, especially her brother, Mason. Margot is moral, sympathetic despite her often selfish actions, and though she tries to kill Mason, this is in self-defence after years of physical torment.
Mason Verger
"I'm right with the Risen Jesus, and it's all okay now. And nobody beats the Riz."
Click here to see him pre-disfigurement.
Played By: Michael Pitt (Season 2), Joe Anderson (Season 3)
The sadistic brother of Margot Verger and heir to the Verger meat-packing fortune. He has a weird hobby of rearing pigs that eat human flesh.
- Abled in the Adaptation: Downplayed in that Verger is still a disfigured quadriplegic in the film, but unlike in the novel, he's not bedridden, he can breathe without the aid of a mechanical respirator, and he doesn't require a special device to keep his lidless eyeball moist.
- Adaptational Attractiveness:
- He doesn't look anywhere near as good in the films. Of course, this is because he's already horribly disfigured by Hannibal at that point.
- Even after being mutilated he looks better, as the upper half of his face is left intact.
- Adaptational Villainy: Not that he was a particularly nice person in the book, but him being responsible for Margot's infertility is only in the show. In novel form, it was caused by Margot injecting herself with steroids.
- Animal Motifs: Pigs. His family owns a chain of slaughterhouses, Margot mentions his "understanding of piggishness", and much of his childhood was spent around them. Perhaps best of all, Mason's nose post-disfigurement resembles a pig's snout.
- Arc Villain: Of the second half of Season 2 through the first half of Season 3.
- Asshole Victim: What happens to him is beyond horrifying, but if anyone deserves it, it's Mason.
- Finally dies a well-deserved death by drowning and his pet eel crawling into his throat.
- Autocannibalism: Eats his own nose under a heavy dosage of drugs.Mason: I'm full of myself!
- Earlier, he licks his own blood off his hands after being given a bloody nose, and seems pleasantly surprised by the taste.
- Ax-Crazy: He’s a psychotic pedophile who inflicts wanton violence for nothing more than cheap thrills.
- Best Served Cold: Placed a bounty on Hannibal in Season 3 with the intent of having him captured and then eaten.
- Big Bad Wannabe: He imagines he is a master of human psychology and that his wealth will allow him to get away with anything, but consistently miscalculates just how far he has pushed others including his sister. When he becomes entangled with real Manipulative Bastards like Will and Hannibal, he's obviously but unwittingly out of his depth. His disfigurement at the hands of Hannibal finally pushes him over the edge into insanity as he torments Margot with renewed vigor, makes plans to capture Hannibal, mutilate him and eventually eat him piece by piece... ironically making him a more effective antagonist. The only reason he doesn't ascend into Big Bad territory is that as horrible as Mason is, Hannibal is worse.
- Big Brother Bully: Assaulted his sister, and spends every scene they're in together tormenting her.
- Black Comedy: He introduces an adorable piglet called Pavlov to Margot in his first scene. He's training it to eat her. He's constantly making cracks that stand on the border between hilarious and nauseating. What happens to him in "Tome-wan" goes way beyond Black Comedy into something freakish.
- Brother–Sister Incest: He is implied to have sexually abused Margot. It was a much more prominent aspect of his character in the books and films.
- Much less subtly implied in a conversation Mason has with Margot in Season 3 where he outright says he would like to give her a baby. The entire conversation is subtext for his desire to impregnate her.
- Cain and Abel: Clearly willing and prepared to kill Margot should she become too much trouble.
- Churchgoing Villain: Starts talking a lot about forgiveness and accepting Jesus after his disfigurement. Doesn't stop him from plotting to kill those who have wronged him though, so he might just be putting on an act.
- Religion of Evil: Mason apparently (positively) views Christianity this way, speaking of his born-again conversion like it's yet another useful allegiance or political connection that will help him inflict pain on whoever he wants and avoid any repercussions for his actions.
- Dark Lord on Life Support: He's left quadriplegic and dependent on a ventilator after Hannibal breaks his neck.
- Domestic Abuse: To his sister, Margot, who lives with him on their family's estate.
- Doomed by Canon: As with Will, the show explores events that occurred prior to the books more fully.
- Drink-Based Characterization: Enjoys his martinis with human tears. Margot's or children's for first preference.
- Eccentric Millionaire: Times Ax-Crazy.
- Evil Cripple: After Hannibal breaks his neck, Mason becomes paralyzed, confined to a respirator and has to wear a neck brace.
- Eviler than Thou: This guy was invented to make Hannibal Lecter look good.
- Evil Versus Evil: Against Hannibal.
- Fate Worse than Death: He has a very bad day after deciding to take on Hannibal. He's force-fed a psychotropic drug and then convinced to cut all the flesh from his jaw off and feed it to Will's dogs, then eat his own nose. Then Hannibal snaps his neck and leaves him quadriplegic, and at the complete mercy of the sister he's tormented from childhood.
- Faux Affably Evil: As bombastic as he appears to be in-person to anyone speaking, Mason is still a twisted person, breaking his sister's arm for no reason other than sadistic enjoyment. The casting description for the role even lists him as being Moriarty-like, while Fuller had stated he was akin to the Joker to Hannibal's Batman and had a "haute creep pimp quality".
- Fed to Pigs: He threatens Margot with this fate, dressing pieces of meat in her suits, spraying them with her perfume, and then feeding them to pigs while playing the screams of a woman over speakers. Mason himself ends up with half his face fed to Will's dogs.
- Foregone Conclusion: Mason's fate is more or less the same as it is in the books and the movies.
- Foil: To Hannibal, again, as part of his Eviler than Thou set-up. Where Hannibal is a subtle manipulator with exquisite taste, Mason is crude, blunt, and something of an Agent Peacock. Similarly, where Hannibal is a Self-Made Man who carries out his crimes on his own, Mason relies entirely on Carlos and his crew and derives his power almost entirely from his father's wealth and will. Even Mason's obsession with feeding people to his pigs contrasts with Hannibal's tendency to turn them into gorgeous Food Porn.
- Four Eyes, Zero Soul: There is nothing human in Mason.
- Fur and Loathing: Mason's partial to fur coats, which shouldn't be surprising given his wealth and personality.
- Giggling Villain: His laughter is distinctive and alarming.
- Harmful to Minors: Poor little Franklin. Plus, there's his implied sexual abuse of some boys at a summercamp for underprivileged children and then there's forcibly aborting Margot's child and sterilizing her to make sure she can't have another.
- Hate Sink: As ever, Mason Verger is the most loathsome character in the Hannibal mythos, in order to keep titular protagonist somewhat sympathetic. Both Hannibal and Mason are terrible, evil people, but Mason lacks any of Hannibal's Evil Virtues and doesn't have the delusion that he's doing his victims a favour, instead simply being a Smug Snake Rich Bitch Domestic Abuser, pedophile and murderer who thinks he can get away with anything just because he is from a rich and important family.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: His penchant for sadism and prolonging his victims' agony comes to bite him badly when during his elaborate plans, Margot and Alana decide to betray him.
- Idle Rich: Does what he does apparently because he's got nothing better to do with his time. Which makes his fate as a paralysis victim even more karmic.
- I Taste Delicious: After eating his own nose under the influence of psychotropic drugs, he remarks that it tastes like chicken gizzard.
- Jerkass: Relentlessly bullies his sister, while pretending that he's helping her. He later tells a child that he's going to lose his foster parents and cat for fun.
- Karmic Death: He's choked to death with his own pet eel at the hand of Margot, as in the books.
- Kick the Dog: Constantly does this to his sister Margot. For example, showing her how he plans to kill her, playing mind games with her, and needlessly leaving a scar on her after her forced abortion. Implanting her fetus in a pig and then allowing it to die is a new low though.
- Laughably Evil: Even moreso in Season 3 where he is hilarious even while suggesting or doing extremely evil things.
- Laughing Mad: After Hannibal drugs him.
- Malevolent Masked Men: Receives a prosthetic for the lower half of his face after Hannibal's drug-induced "treatment".
- Messy Hair: Sticks straight up from his head. Probably needs rather a lot of gel.
- Neck Snap: A non-fatal one. He almost certainly wishes it had been otherwise.
- No-Sell: Has little reaction to Will punching him in the face. He just calmly wipes the blood from his nose, tastes it, and says that he's going to feed Will to his pigs in the same tone that one might say the punchline to a joke.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: In season 3, as a result of the recast from American Michael Pitt to English Joe Anderson. Mason's accent veers sharply between American drawl, Transatlantic, and firmly English. This frequently occurs during the same scene, and sometimes even within the same sentence.
- Overlord Jr.: He seems to have learned most of his sadistic behavior from his father, whom he idolizes.
- Plucky Comic Relief: It says something about how batshit crazy this show is if the comic relief comes in the form of an evil billionaire with no face.
- Psychopathic Manchild: This is essentially Hannibal's diagnosis, to the point that he tells Mason, "A child's illusions about his father are no basis for a man's life." Additionally, Mason's mannerisms often seem to be those of a Spoiled Brat.
- Sadist: Mason Boy in a nutshell.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: He devotes his time to grotesque pursuits seemingly because his wealth allows him to get away with them.
- Sissy Villain: He's introduced while wearing a lavish fur coat and has somewhat effeminate mannerisms.
- Slimeball: You can almost see the layer of mucus he leaves behind, as he slugs along from scene-to-scene enacting horrific hobbies.
- The Sociopath: He is the image of impulsive flavor of sociopathy, contrasting the more subtle, controlled kind that Hannibal represents.
- Smug Snake: He sees himself as the genius super-villain who is always one step ahead. Hannibal brutally disavows him of that notion.
- Stupid Evil: Continues to abuse Margot even when he's disabled and helpless.
- Unwitting Pawn: Hannibal lets him know about Margot's plan to have a baby, prompting him to have her sterilized, all to get Will to kill him to further his moral descent. Will figures it out, and Mason is none too happy about being manipulated.
- Would Hurt a Child: It's kind of his thing. He's already been shown psychologically traumatizing a needy foster child in order to get his tears, and he has no problem sterilizing Margot and aborting his potential nephew/niece. He also implies that he sexually abused some boys at a summer camp for underprivileged children. He takes Margot's fetus and puts it into a pig's uterus. Sick even by his low standards.
Molson Verger
Played By: N/A
The late father of Mason and Margot.
- Death by Adaptation: While he also dies in the books, the literary version was still alive at the time of Mason's 'treatment' from Lecter, whereas this version is already dead by the time his son is disfigured and crippled.
- Posthumous Character: Died prior to Season 2, if not the show in general.
Veger Family Associates
Carlo Deogracias
"With you, it is personal now."
Played by: Daniel Kash
Mason Verger's primary enforcer and handyman in Season 2.
- Ascended Extra: In the books, he has no affiliation with Mason before being hired to kidnap Hannibal after his escape.
- The Dragon: To Mason in Season 2, acting as his enforcer.
- Eaten Alive: From the waist down by Mason's pigs, thanks to Hannibal.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He might be a "professional revenger", but he did love his brother and is distraught by his death.
- It's Personal: Quoted verbatim because of Hannibal's killing his brother.
- Noodle Incident: According to Mason, Carlo fed a man alive to pigs in Tuscany several years ago. Carlo responds to this allegation with a 'whaddaya gonna do' shrug.
- You Killed My Father: Hannibal kills his brother Matteo while being captured, leading Carlo to be unusually insistent on finishing him off before Mason gets to have his fun.
Cordell Doemling
"You'll be sure to let me know if this hurts, won't you?"
Played by: Glenn Fleshler
"Hands are how we touch the world. They're tactile. Remove a patient's arm and he will still feel phantom digits."
The creepy yet gentle and intelligent nurse to Mason Verger.
- Adaptational Villainy: His film equivalent was a more unwilling accomplice to Mason, motivated by money rather than sadism or loyalty, and even eventually killed Mason. Even the book version, who was fully on board with Mason and implied to be a child molester, never showed this Cordell's level of sadism.
- Affably Evil: Is never anything but polite and courteous to Will and Hannibal, even after the former bites a hole in Cordell's cheek. He and Hannibal seem like regular birds of a feather during the brief conversation they have.
- Back-Alley Doctor: In a sense. Mason mentions that Cordell is not legally allowed to practice medicine, due to his views on pain. Mason considers this a plus.
- Composite Character: As in the film, takes the surname of Mason's other advisor from the book Dr. Doemling, although most of that character's role is given to Alana.
- Deadly Doctor: A highly competent doctor and a highly competent henchman.
- The Dragon: To Mason in Season 3.
- Hypercompetent Sidekick: Mason regards him as this and he has the skills to back it up, serving his boss as a physiotherapist, transplant surgeon and gourmet chef.
- Karmic Death: Hannibal gives him the same fate that Cordell intended for Will: his face sliced off while conscious, then left to die from blood loss/trauma.
- Self-Surgery: He performs plastic surgery on his own cheek to treat the hole Will bit out of it.
- Soft-Spoken Sadist: He says the most awful things with a very pleasant tone.
- To the Pain: He tells Hannibal exactly what's going to happen to him. Oddly enough, it comes across as bizarrely comforting due to his polite tone and the clear bond he has with Hannibal."Have they told you the drill yet? The drill is, in a few hours I'll come down here and remove all you've got below the elbows and knees. I'll keep you going with IVs and tourniquets until the very last. Some things are best saved for last. Once you're dead, I'll prepare your loins and ribs, aged."
- Torture Technician: Due to being a skilled doctor, he's very good at causing pain.
- Undying Loyalty: Seems to consider Mason's happiness as his only concern: he's prepared to commit murder and prepare cannibalistic dishes for him.
- Villainous Friendship: With his boss, Mason Verger. They get along very well, and Cordell's extremely loyal to Mason.
- Wicked Cultured: Aside from being a ruthless killer, Cordell is an excellent chef. Hannibal is clearly very impressed by his talent and interest.
