Michael C. Hall Interview

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW:
MICHAEL C. HALL ON “DEXTER”
By Abbie Bernstein

Here’s something you might not know about actor Michael C. Hall from his intense, Golden Globe-winning and multi-Emmy-nominated performance as the title character on Showtime’s DEXTER: he laughs easily. Dexter Morgan, as viewers know, has trouble connecting to other people. This is because he’s a serial killer who has channeled his darkest urges into only taking the lives of other murderers. In his daytime life, Dexter works as a blood splatter expert for the Miami Metro Police Department. Over the course of the show, Dexter’s sister Deborah (Jennifer Carpenter) has been promoted first to detective and, this season, to lieutenant. Dexter has suffered a lot over the course of the series, now in its sixth season. An especially brutal blow was the Season Four death of his wife Rita (Julie Benz) at the hands of the Trinity Killer, played by John Lithgow in a performance that won him an Emmy.

Hall is standing by himself in the midst of a crowded party thrown by CBS and its affiliate networks, Showtime and the CW, for the Television Critics Association. Asked if he is amenable to an interview, Hall courteously assents. The mention of Lithgow prompts a polite correction from Hall - the pronunciation is not, as the spelling indicates, “Lith-gow,” but rather “Lith-go.” Hall’s explanation is occasion for one of the aforementioned laughs. “It’s okay, I always thought it was ‘gow,’ until he showed up on the show and I learned,” he relates.

Hall, a North Carolina native who studied acting at NYU, has been in a few films in recent years - GAMER, PEEP WORLD, THE TROUBLE WITH BLISS - and also has an extensive stage careers, complete with stints in Broadway musicals, including the revivals of CHICAGO as Billy Flynn and in CABARET as the Emcee. His musical theatre skills came in handy in GAMER for a sequence where he sang and danced to “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Actually, he wasn’t singing in that scene, Hall points out. “Honestly, in that particular movie, I was lip-synching to a Sammy Davis Jr. song. But there was choreography involved.” So is he looking to do an actual musical project? “I’m very open to that possibility. We’ll see what happens.”

What we know so far of DEXTER’s Season Six is that Edward James Olmos plays Professor James Gellar, a religious scholar whose belief in the Apocalypse has driven him and a disciple (Colin Hanks) to stage gory tableaux that are throwing Miami Metro into a frenzy at the same time Dexter is pondering the nature of faith.

Most series and their personnel don’t want to leak spoilers. In the case of DEXTER, if anyone associated with the show told us any secrets, they might really have to kill us, so questions to Hall are by necessity of a more general nature.

Hall says he didn’t actually expect DEXTER to go beyond Year One, not because he thought it wasn’t good enough, but rather because he thought it was too good to last. “Anything beyond the first season has felt like a miracle. We finished the first, and I felt, ‘Well, we should just stop, because it’s perfect.’ So It’s like a layered savory-sweet cake, with layers of icing on top of gravy on top of icing on top of gravy. I can appreciate that people have an appetite for these stories and this character, and I’m really, really gratified that we have such imaginative writers to keep the ball rolling and keep pushing it into new places and finding new thematic elements to explore.”

Season Four ended with the horror of Rita’s murder. In Season Five, Dexter got, if not precisely healed, at least a measure of equilibrium from his time with Julia Stiles’ Lumen, a much-abused woman who reclaimed her sanity as Dexter helped her kill her tormentors. “I think after the fourth season,” Hall says, “unless we were going to jump forward I don’t know how far, we had to take responsibility for the mess that had been made of his life, and did that through a storyline that allowed him to, initially unconsciously, but come to an awareness and appreciation of the fact that he was atoning for Rita’s death. And as he helped sort of salve the wounds that Lumen had, he probably soothed himself as well.”

DEXTER has a new show runner this year, Scott Buck. Is he bringing anything different to the series, in Hall’s opinion? “Scott’s been with us from the beginning. He’s someone who put the writing on the wall in terms of the DNA of the show, and he can both reach back to that origin and also reinvigorate it with this sense of new energy. He’s really reinvigorated the show, I think.”

Hall says he doesn’t have a favorite season or arc. “It’s hard to pinpoint a singular thread. I just appreciate that the fabric is as rich as it is.”

Okay, how about a favorite adversary for Dexter? “It’s probably a two-sided coin with the Ice Truck Killer and Trinity on either side. I think one was his brother, one was the most prolific serial killer ever. Both were serial killers. They’re sort of the two most intimate relationships, he’s had because of that [commonality of being serial killers.”

Is there anything else Hall would like to say right now about DEXTER? The laugh emerges again, and the question is amended to, is there anything he’d like to say that he’s allowed to say right now? “I’ll say that, as an actor, there are things that have happened this season that have sort of shaken me up in ways that I haven’t been shaken up yet, so hopefully that will be the case for people watching as well.”

Interview By Abbie Bernstein