Hannibal's Next Dish: Jennifer Love Hewitt?

When Jennifer Love Hewitt was cast as Satan opposite Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins in Alec Baldwin's contemporary retelling of The Devil and Daniel Webster, insiders chuckled, predicting the 21-year-old Party of Five princess would be eaten alive. Well, after three days of filming, the actor behind Hannibal Lecter reports that the jury is still out on whether Hewitt has the chops to pull it off.

"I don't know, I've only done three days on it [so far]," Hopkins tells TV Guide Online. "She's very pretty, I know that... I'm sure she's very good. The little bit we did together she seemed very, very good. Don't believe what the press tells you."

Hewitt may have second thoughts about locking horns with the real-life knight after catching his encore performance as the doctor with an appetite for barbecued brains in the grisly Hannibal, the highly anticipated sequel to The Silence of the Lambs (opening tomorrow). But the soft-spoken 63-year-old insists that he's nothing like the man-eating monster he portrays on the big screen.

"I've got a great sense of humor," he says. "I'm always cast [as] these strange men, but that's not really me. People say, 'Why don't you play comedy?' They give me what they think I can do, so why change the rules?"

Well, Hopkins is doing just that in his next film. After Webster wraps, he'll begin work on the Joel Schumacher-directed comedy Black Sheep, starring Chris Rock. "I'm looking forward to doing it," he says of the pic, in which he'll play a veteran CIA agent assigned to train Rock. "It's an actor's dream to work in good American Hollywood commercial movies."

But Hopkins shoots down the theory that he chose Black Sheep to lighten things up after doing three dramas in a row: Hannibal, Hearts in Atlantis (from Shine director Scott Hicks) and Webster. "I never make conscious decisions," he says. "If my agent tells me it's a good script, I'll do it. I don't plot out things. I'm at the roulette table, and my luck seems to be running at the moment, so I may as well stay there until it runs out."