Indeed. She's changed quite a bit already compared to her literary counterpart, and I really liked Fuller's explanation for why they changed her up. (potential spoilers)
Quote:
Even though, in the novel, Margot at this stage of the story really should be 6 years old— because when she first was in therapy with Dr. Lecter, she was a little girl, and she was horribly molested, and it was very, very dark—I didn’t want to tell that story, so we generalized the sadism of Mason Verger so it wasn’t a sexual sadism. It was more, this is a bad man who, like Hannibal, gets off on what people do under certain circumstances.
In the novel, she’s a very masculine character, who has had years of steroid abuse and is a lesbian, and it was unclear to me in the novel whether she was either transgender or a lesbian as a result of those horrible abuses and that horrible childhood and [Beat.] that’s not how transgenderism or homosexuality works. So I didn’t want to contribute to that misconception of what it is to be transgender or a gay woman.
It was important for her to have a strength to her and the idea of the reason she’s going into therapy not being because she was this victim of horrible abuse. Which she is, in a different way. She grew up with a sadist, who was incredibly cruel and will be even more cruel in the future, but I like the idea that she’s in therapy because she tried to kill him, as opposed to because she was so victimized, that she had taken an active role in her victimization and had enough, tried to turn it around, and it didn’t go well for her.
I really liked that scene she had with Will. The two of them feeling each other out and finding some common ground over their experiences as Dr. Lecter's clients. Margot has the potential to be a very interesting surrogate for Dr. Du Maurier in the sense that they've both drawn Hannibal's attention and can use those experiences to relate to Will. Bedelia was a really important ally for Will because she was the only other person to have suffered by Hannibal's meddling, and she came along at an important point in Will's incarceration. She was a reminder to him that there are others besides him who need Hannibal to be taken down. Now that Will is free and actively going toe to toe with Hannibal and trying to understand him so that he can catch him, he needs an anchor to keep him from sinking too far into Hannibal's mindfuckery and to remind him why he needs to do what he's doing. Bedelia's fled for her life, but Margot could fill the role that Bedelia held for Will.