Janice Poon #1
Janice Poon #1
Food Stylist for NBC's Hannibal
Note: This item has been drawn on an 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper (pencil, felt pen and color crayon) - a bit crinkled along edges - and signed by Janice Poon, Mads Mikkelsen, and Gillian Anderson. It is an original drawing done during production of Hannibal in order to discuss concepts for the food.
Janice Poon is an award-winning Toronto painter, sculptor, author and HANNIBAL's food stylist. She explained the process in the HANNIBAL production blog.
"Each week I read the script, and I try to get an idea of what would be the most appropriate, the most beautiful, and yet the most grizzly food I can think of. And of course we have to remember that Hannibal is always eating people - even if he tells you it's lamb tongues, it's people's tongues.
The sky is the limit, creatively speaking. Hannibal is such an intriguing character. The dinners are like the worst nightmare mystery dinners of your life because you could be eating your best friend or your wife for all you know. He is so diabolical. The most challenging is to make food that the actors are going to be able to eat, that is palatable to them - I don't want them freaking out! - and that isn't going to be like spinach and get stuck to their teeth or isn't going to be something they'll have to chew in the middle of their line. For example, sometimes an actor is vegan and the script calls for them to eat raw hamburger, so I have to make some fetching kind of concoction that is not meat but is good for them and that they're comfortable with.
And with on-set cooking you never know what's going to happen. You think you know every single permutation of every possible thing that can happen with a recipe, and wouldn't you know, the one thing you never anticipated happens and then you have to replicate it forty times, that thing you're not ready for.
The best part of this job is dreaming up the recipes, but I love all of it. I love cooking. I love doing the displays. Creating a monstrous, diabolically hideous look, that somehow is curiously delicious."
Janice Poon on Twitter
Janice Poon Art