MICHAEL C. HALL
He's Back! The Return Of Our Favorite Sociopath
Michael C. Hall has repeated time and time that he can’t escape Dexter. His career-defining role has stuck with the show’s fandom and beyond since its conclusion in 2013. It appears that an eight-year hiatus is over now that Showtime has ordered a ten-episode limited series.
In Dexter, Michael C. Hall plays the titular character, a Miami police officer by day and a serial killer who murders killers by night. The upcoming series — it’s expected in fall 2021 — picks up years after Dexter fakes his death and ends up in Oregon. Showtime agreed to greenlight the limited run after Hall and showrunner Clyde Phillips developed an intriguing directive that is still under lock and key.
As for Hall, he is returning to a character that broke every applicable convention he learned at the Tisch School of Arts at New York University. Emotional mirroring doesn’t extend to sociopathic serial killers who don’t have feelings, amirite? That can also take a psychological toll.
“A part of you is absorbing it and marinating in it,” Hall told The Hollywood Reporter. “It takes some time to get it out of your system and to unlearn whatever increasingly ingrained reflexive behavior results from doing something for that long. It’s hard to sort of point to specific things. But I certainly know now that I feel a lot farther from the character than I did two months after it ended.”
So why return to Dexter? Well, for starters, Hall likes that it is a limited series. After spending the better part of a decade on one show, Hall said it would take a lot for him to return to a recurring series. After Dexter, Hall didn’t take another TV role until Netflix’s Safe in 2018. In it, he plays a normal man who uncovers secrets about the people around him.
During his break from TV, the Six Feet Under actor appeared on Broadway in Lazarus and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, in which he played the title character. There, he returned to form, going back to his Shakespearean roots.
But when you have a good thing going, it isn’t easy to not return. Other than the Dexter reboot, he will appear as a character in Shadowplay. That series is in post-production and follows a cop (played by Taylor Kitsch) who arrives in 1946 Berlin to create the police force.
For those who haven’t experienced Dexter yet, you have plenty of time to binge its eight seasons on Netflix.
