‘It’s F*cking Wrong’: Hollywood Star Apologizes to Transgender People for Playing ‘F*cked Up’ Crossdressing Serial Killer in ‘Silence of the Lambs’

Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

Hollywood star Ted Levine expressed regret over playing a “f*cked up” crossdressing serial killer in Silence of the Lambs, insisting he had since become “a lot wiser about transgender issues.”

“There are certain aspects of the movie that don’t hold up too well,” said Levine during an interview with the Hollywood Reporter on Saturday. “We all know more, and I’m a lot wiser about transgender issues. There are some lines in that script and movie that are unfortunate.”

Addressing his performance as the crossdressing serial killer Buffalo Bill – who kills women so that he can wear their skin – Levine said that he had come to regret the role since “having gotten aware and worked with trans folks, and understanding a bit more about the culture and the reality of the meaning of gender.”

“It’s unfortunate that the film vilified that, and it’s fucking wrong. And you can quote me on that,” he told the magazine. “I didn’t play him as being gay or trans. I think he was just a fucked-up heterosexual man. That’s what I was doing.”

While Buffalo Bill’s character is not explicitly said to be transgender in the movie, he does wear women’s clothing, makeup, and skin as part of a psychotic desire to transform into a woman.

Jonathan Demme, the director of the movie, denied in 2014 that Buffalo Bill was truly transgender, claiming that the character’s obsession with becoming a woman was merely “another way to escape” his self-loathing.

“He didn’t wish to be another gender,” said Demme. “He didn’t really have a sexual preference. He loathed himself – he wanted to transform himself so that there was no sense of him in the ‘new’ him [and] becoming a woman… that was his method of doing it […] He wished he was a woman not because he always wanted to be a woman. This was another way to escape.”

President Donald Trump has spoken repeatedly about Silence of the Lambs and “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” another serial killer in the movie, mentioning the fictional cannibal’s penchant for human flesh on a number of occasions.

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