(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 19 December 2025 7:00, UK
Jon Bernthal has played some pretty spectacular characters in his career, managing to finally make one of Marvel‘s toughest characters work on the screen when he first appeared as The Punisher.
He’s played soldiers, police officers, gangsters, tennis coaches, and even a Greek hero in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming version of The Odyssey, with an unbeatable, authentic Greek accent.
Given his love of the genre, it’s surprising that more of Bernthal’s great performances haven’t come through in horror films, with the closest he’s come to that was starring in the first two seasons of The Walking Dead, playing a character who waited approximately five minutes into a zombie apocalypse to shag his friend’s wife.
In 2017, he spoke to The Independent about his film Wind River, where he plays a character who gets killed off early in the story. This lack of exposure might have annoyed some actors, but Bernthal didn’t seem too vexed, explaining that it was because he knew that you could have a major impact on a movie without being central to it, citing The Silence of the Lambs as an example.
“What Ted Levine did with his portrayal of Buffalo Bill, there wasn’t much screen time, but it was absolutely haunting,” he said, “Everyone talks about Anthony Hopkins in that film, which was obviously great, but what Ted did, he created the most horrifying character in the history of film in five or six minutes on film.”
When it comes to Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel, there’s only one character most people want to discuss, and that is Anthony Hopkins’ version of Dr Hannibal Lecter, rightly held up as one of the greatest movie villains ever, which is weird when you consider that he isn’t the primary antagonist of the story.
That honour falls to Jame ‘Buffalo Bill’ Gumb, an androgynous serial killer who kidnaps women, holds them hostage in a giant pit in his home, and then skins them. Bill, as portrayed by Levine, is just as creepy (if not more so) than his more famous co-star, and the sequence in which he applies makeup while dancing to ‘Goodbye Horses’ by Q Lazzarus is one of the best and spine-chilling parts of the entire movie.
It’s a well-known fact that The Silence of the Lambs swept the board at the Oscars, winning ‘Best Picture’, the only horror movie to ever do so, and delivered director Demme and screenwriter Ted Tally awards in their respective categories, and crowned Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster as the homecoming king and queen, and yet, there was nothing for Levine. He wasn’t even nominated for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, and while you could argue that he doesn’t appear on screen for long enough, there’s also Hermione Baddeley, who was nominated for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for just two minutes and 19 seconds of work.
Without Levine’s bone-chilling interpretation of Buffalo Bill, The Silence of the Lambs simply wouldn’t be as good, so Bernthal is absolutely right to single him out for having made the most of his minutes.
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