It was never part of any mission statement I had,” insists Michael C Hall, “playing characters who are, in one way or another, surrounded by dead bodies.” He smiles, shrewdly. “But it’s just sort of how it went down.” It’s true – at this point, the 54-year-old American actor has spent roughly two and a half decades rubbing shoulders with corpses, first as David Fisher, the uptight, gay mortician in HBO’s coruscatingly morbid TV gem Six Feet Under, and then, in an on-and-off 20-year run, as Miami-based serial killer Dexter Morgan, who supplied many of the cadavers himself.
Hall is speaking to me from his home in North Carolina, days before the premiere of Dexter: Resurrection, a new series reviving his killer-with-a-code. Even condensed to the size of a laptop screen, his face is a great, telegenic one. Arching, mischievous eyebrows complicate the effect of his hard-angled leading-man jawline: throw in a smirk and some mood lighting, and the whole thing becomes quite benignly devilish. It’s the face of a man born to play everyone’s favourite murderer.
The original Dexter finished its initial eight-season run in 2013, with an episode that made waves for all the wrong reasons: in a stroke of aleatoric TV-finale logic, Hall’s character faked his own death and moved to Oregon to become a lumberjack. “Remember the Monsters?” has been cited among the worst finales ever made, and Hall himself has described it as “pretty unsatisfying and infuriating for fans”. So eight years later, he revisited the character for Dexter: New Blood, a frosty sequel miniseries set in rural upstate New York. That series ended starkly, with Dexter being shot dead by his teenage son Harrison. What Resurrection presupposes is: what if he wasn’t?
“I was talking to Marcos Siega, a producing director on the show, and I just casually said, ‘You know… he didn’t get shot in the head,’” Hall recalls. “‘What if he didn’t die? Is that crazy?’” The series devotes much of its first episode to circuitously undoing Dexter’s demise, awakening him from a coma before re-situating him in New York City. “I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense,” one character tells him, in a sort of winking meta-admission of the new show’s conceptual fudge. But once the former “Bay Harbor Butcher” is allowed to prowl the streets of the Big Apple, all of this stops mattering, and Resurrection becomes the most solidly fun Dexter entry there’s been since midway through the series’ original run.
“I became increasingly compelled by the notion that, if he didn’t die, Dexter may finally find himself liberated,” says Hall. “He’s been lugging around and brooding over his past for many years, and the idea of finding him in a new environment was enticing. It always felt like a crapshoot, a dice roll, whatever you want to call it – but it was worth rolling those dice.”
I read Hall’s own words back to him from an interview in 2022, when he said that he had a “desire for closure” for Dexter, which “had to do with wanting to move on”. He laughs. Often, the term “nervous energy” describes a sort of fast, fidgety animatedness. Hall, though, seems to hold all his nervous energy as static. When he laughs, the sound squeezes from his throat with a sort of grateful relief.
“You know, in a way, I feel like the closure is still there,” he says. “I mean, saying goodbye – we say goodbye to places, to roles, to relationships that re-emerge in our lives, and we can see them through a different lens in a different context. And so I do feel like there was a part of the character that did need to be done away with and needed closure. And that closure is a part of what makes this new iteration possible. It was kind of a crazy notion. But I like crazy notions.”
This series also boasts maybe the strongest supporting cast in a Dexter season to date: Neil Patrick Harris, Breaking Bad’s Krysten Ritter, and Modern Family’s Eric Stonestreet all play serial killers. Uma Thurman, meanwhile, portrays the steely head of security for an eccentric serial-killer-obsessed billionaire, played with relish by Peter Dinklage. “As an actor, you’re only as good as the people you’re acting with,” Hall says. “And it was gratifying that people of this calibre joined us – it gave us a sense that, OK, we’re not out of our minds. If Peter Dinklage or Uma Thurman saw something they thought was a horrendous idea, they wouldn’t sign up.”
Resurrection is one of two Dexter projects currently on TV; the other, Dexter: Original Sin, is a prequel series that premiered last December, and features Hall as the voice of the narrator and Dexter’s inner monologue. When it comes to Hall’s own origin story, he boils it down to two “formative moments”. The first came when he was 11 years old, when his father, William Carlyle Hall, an IBM systems engineer, died of prostate cancer at the age of 39. It was a family marked by tragedy: his mother Janice, a mental health counsellor, had already lost a daughter in infancy before Hall was born. “When my father passed away, that was… a fundamental moment in my life,” he says, soberly.
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The second “pivotal origin chapter” of Hall’s life came, he says, in his early twenties, when he moved to New York to try to make it as an actor. It was a time of uncertainty and flashes of self-doubt, and it was only when, in 1999, Hall was cast in Sam Mendes’ Broadway production of Cabaret – as the Emcee, an impish ringmaster role originated by Joel Grey – that things began to change. “It was the first time I had any sort of significant paycheque,” he says, “and was the first thing that kept me showing up and believing in myself. I’d had other parts, but not like that. It gave me the first sense, from the exterior world, that maybe I was gonna pull this off.”
He has continued to act sporadically on Broadway ever since, including in a revival of Chicago in 2002, and in the title role of the 2014-15 staging of John Cameron Mitchell’s queer classic Hedwig and the Angry Inch. By coincidence, I spoke to Mitchell a couple of hours before our interview; he still brims with affection for his former collaborator. “People forget – or don’t know – that Michael has a beautiful voice, and it doesn’t fit into any one genre. It can work a lot of angles,” Mitchell tells me. “And he’s just a real mensch – he cares.”
It may be no wonder that Hall’s voice is something of a secret to many viewers: Dexter’s socially challenged antihero naturally afforded Hall scant chance to show off his pipes. He’s also never done a movie musical. (His film work does include a leading role in the 2014 thriller Cold in July and a memorable final-act villain part in the superlative 2018 comedy Game Night.) To scratch his musical itch, he started his own band, Princess Goes, an avant-garde indie outfit formed of former Hedwig backing musicians. And he did, of course, manage to sing on screen a handful of times in Six Feet Under, the funny and complexly human series created by American Beauty’s Alan Ball in 2001.
It was Mendes who initially recommended him for the series, in which he played the closeted middle child of a family of undertakers. Frances Conroy played his mother, Peter Krause and Lauren Ambrose his siblings, while Richard Jenkins played his father – killed off in a hearse accident at the beginning of the pilot episode. The first season saw Hall deliver a phenomenal performance as a man struggling with grief and his own sexuality; it yielded – unbelievably – his only Emmy nomination for the series (though he would later bag five more acting nods during Dexter’s run).
“David Fisher was a unique character in terms of the TV and film landscape,” Hall says, plainly. “He wasn’t incidentally gay. He wasn’t comic relief. He was a fundamental part of the fabric of that story. I think all the characters in that show were some aspect of Alan Ball, but I knew this was a very important character for him, and I felt charged with a responsibility to bring authentic life to it.”
Throughout its run, Six Feet Under was hailed as a key part of what was later branded the “golden age” of television – a creative revolution that brought TV dramas to new heights. But while interest has continued to simmer in The Sopranos, for instance, Ball’s series has endured as more of a cult object. “The Sopranos was like the firstborn, golden son,” Hall says, “and Six Feet Under was sort of the black-sheep sibling. It existed, zeitgeist-wise, or priorities-of-the-network-wise, in the shadow of The Sopranos. But I don’t have a chip on my shoulder about Six Feet Under being massively underappreciated. I knew it meant a great deal to people who loved it, and it broke storytelling boundaries in a way that paved the way for a great many storytellers that followed.”
If there’s something that links Hall’s two defining roles, it’s the idea of having an “essential conflict and an essential secret”, he says. “There’s something attractive about a character who’s emerging to triumph in the midst of a story that’s been full of setbacks and blows.” It may be particularly attractive for Hall, who has, he concedes, lived a life filled with “twists and turns and challenges and triumphs and surprises”.
Hall’s first marriage, to actor Amy Spanger, ended in divorce in 2006. His second, to Dexter co-star Jennifer Carpenter, lasted from 2008 to 2011. In 2010, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, at the age of 38, just one year younger than the age at which his father died. He continued to work on Dexter while undergoing treatment, and later that year he was given the all clear. In 2016, he married Morgan Macgregor, then a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the pair remain happily together. Twists and turns; challenges and triumphs.
Amid this, Dexter Morgan has been a perennial companion in Hall’s life, his own “Dark Passenger” – to use the series’ term. As Hall has weathered the slings and arrows of the world, so too has his onscreen counterpart. “But how our lives intersect and diverge… I don’t spend too much time musing about that,” Hall says. “Because – like all people – I’m struggling to stay sane.
“If nothing else,” he adds, “returning to Dexter is nice, because he is essentially resilient. And it’s fun to spend time with a character like that.” He pauses, and seems to backpedal a little. “I mean, I can’t imagine actually living his life,” Hall says. “It’s just awful. So stressful, and burdensome. But he keeps showing up! He has this sort of blind optimism about him.”
He grins again: those arching eyebrows; that devilish smirk. He may be surrounded by dead bodies, but Michael C Hall seems utterly in the midst of life.
‘Dexter: Resurrection’ is streaming now on Paramount+, with new episodes released weekly
