Gary Oldman is no stranger to wigs and the Hollywood makeup chair. To play Dracula for Francis Ford Coppola, Oldman donned swirly white hair done up in geisha buns, and saw his face morphed into a variety of vampy visages through prosthetics and cosmetics. But in Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, the only clue to Oldman’s identity in an uncredited performance (prior to home video) as the hideously disfigured antagonist Mason Verger is a brief, blurred flashback sequence that depicts how Verger ended up looking like . In the flashback, an unblemished Oldman in brown leather pants attempts to seduce Hannibal Lecter. He dangles from an autoerotic asphyxiation cord and accepts a “popper” from Lecter, which puts Verger under the influence of a different cocktail of drugs altogether. Lecter then convinces a delirious Verger to carve up his own face with a shard of broken mirror and feed the tissue to dogs. The only thing more gruesome than the result is that Thomas Harris based this character on a man who while on PCP.
