Nah, Hughs 5'11 And Mads Is 6'. And Wills Height...

I wasn’t going to publish this because it makes me feel silly, but because of the claim that the stuff in the Prop Store auction is full canon and was approved by Bryan Fuller (in the OP), I thought I’d better.

Actor height debates are a regular part of fandom, so this is stuff that’s gone around a few times and back. But basically what I’ve gleaned over the years from this one amounts to:

• Actors might lie about their heights on their CV’s, such that there’s a common joke that they automatically add 4 inches (if this is true of Hugh, it might be because he had the modeling career for a while; standard height requirements for male models is usually above 5′10″)

• If you’re looking at Hugh’s height at 5′11″, you’re looking at his CV

• same site reports Hugh at 5′9.5″, fwiw; there’s a nice comparative picture to Richard Armitage in the comments with a link that still works (the other links are all dead)

• fans who have met him have reported to me personally in previous (equally silly XD) discussions about this that he’s taller than 5′8″, but not by much; 5′9″ or 5′10″ is most common…there’s not a consensus, though

The point is, if you’re googling “Hugh Dancy height,” you’re not getting unbiased reporting. There is no information out there that’s solidly factual and verifiable about what his height is, and no way to get it, either.

As for the Prop Store auction, you should know that those props appear to be created by people (probably in a hurry) well down the ladder from Bryan Fuller, and one can’t be sure that he’s even aware of all the information on them. The most egregious example of this is here:

This is from “Contorno,” when Rinaldo Pazzi goes back to look up Hannibal Lecter in the Questura database before calling Mason Verger. It is the Questura, not VICAP or Interpol:

This item literally lists Hannibal Lecter as wanted for murder, by the Questura, before they know he’s committed any murders on their soil, and shows his current employment at the Conservatory, and that his alias is Dr. Roman Fell. This is not information they would have, it directly contradicts what drives Pazzi to call Mason Verger (that he knows the Questura won’t back him up if he pursues Hannibal Lecter), and it would mean that the Questura would have literally known they had a murderer sitting at the Conservatory and not done anything about it before Mason Verger paid them off (which didn’t happen until after Pazzi was killed).

People have also said that the Italian here is clearly a Google translate version of Italian. I couldn’t speak to that, but if it’s true, it goes to show how these things are produced without a great deal of care, given that the production has significant people on it who speak Italian and could have given it a once-over.

In other words, this one piece of prop documentation introduced all kinds of plot holes into the story, and I very much doubt that Bryan Fuller would have wanted it to be the case if he had noticed it and had any time to do anything about it. And this one actually made it onto the screen.

This suggests that the various documents that the Prop Store sold were not overseen that closely, especially items that were produced to be in the backgrounds of shots or inside of files and whatnot, where it was never likely that they would show up on screen in any kind of readable way.

Case in point (since your statement is specifically about Will Graham’s stats via one of these sheets): Will’s documentation from one hospital listed him at 145 lbs, while another hospital had him at 175 lbs. Are we supposed to believe that the show meant us to think that Will gained (or lost) 30 lbs from all that cannibal cooking? I don’t think so. I tend to think that the people who make these props just try to use their best judgment and get the damn things done, rather than actually research or ask anyone.

So Hugh being 5′8″ in that document is probably the result of someone guessing at his height (which is hard to do accurately, and it’s a lot easier to mistake 5′9″ for 5′8″ than it is to mistake 5′11″ for 5′8″), and no one particularly checking it for accuracy because it doesn’t matter, and Bryan Fuller probably never saw it and has no idea what was on it.

TL;DR: While Bryan Fuller and various directors on Hannibal did emphasize the height difference between Hannibal and Will at various points, there’s no telling from the internet what Hugh’s actual height is, and the Prop Store documents are not canon (most of them don’t even appear on the show) or even consistent among themselves and the show. Therefore suggesting that Bryan Fuller purposefully made Will Graham three inches shorter than Hugh Dancy in order to have a height difference of four inches between Hannibal and Will–for whatever reason–is a claim based in erroneous information and leaps of faith at every level.