You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste… Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you – Officer Starling…? That accent you’re trying so desperately to shed – pure West Virginia. What was your father, dear? Was he a coal miner? Did he stink of the lamp…? And oh, how quickly the boys found you! All those tedious, sticky fumblings, in the back seats of cars, while you could only dream of getting out. Getting anywhere. Getting all the way – to the F…B…I.
Anthony Hopkins’s performance as Hannibal Lecter in 1991’s Silence of the Lambs is without question one of the best of his career. His dressing down of Jodie Foster’s green FBI agent Clarice Starling is one of the greatest (and most mocking) monologues of all time.