Michael C Hall first played Dexter in the eponymous show 19 years ago when the first episode dropped on Showtime. He essayed the forensic technician, moonlighting as a vigilante serial killer, for seven years before taking a backseat. He reprised the role eight years later in Dexter: New Blood, set 10 years after the season 8 finale.
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He’s a father to Harrison Morgan now, who goes in his father’s footsteps and shoots his own dad in the New Blood finale. Now, as Hall returns to find his absconding son in Dexter: Resurrection (streaming in India on Amazon Prime Video), he talks to SCREEN exclusively about the father-son dynamic, shifting action to New York City, and rounding up a deadly roaster of assassins in the new installment.
Between Dexter: New Blood and Dexter: Resurrection, you played the “inner voice” of the character in the prequel series, Dexter: Original Sin. How did that help you going into Resurrection?
The show has often alluded to Dexter’s origin story and those early years. I’ve also thought about them imaginatively as an actor. But to have the chance to spend time with those scripts and the show, and to do the voiceover, that just gave fully-fleshed out colour to what had probably been a notion, an outline, or a line drawing. So, it was really helpful to spend time thinking about the character’s origin story in detail, which I hadn’t before. It was really good preparation for the return. For the audience, it enriches their time spent with the character in the present tense.
The setting in Resurrection is New York City, which isn’t as snowy as Iron Lake in New Blood or as summery as Miami in the previous seasons. How does that lend a new texture to the show?
It’s a new place to hide in plain sight. Miami is also a big city, but it couldn’t be more different in terms of its climate and architecture. Miami is round, hot, and sweaty. New York is cold, steely, angular, and concrete. I think of that environment as symbolic of Dexter’s rigid commitment to who he is and who he isn’t. Being in the physical environment of New York helped fortify that. It’s also a place where many, many people congregate. So there’s an increasing likelihood that Dexter will encounter formidable and worthy victims, and he does in ways unanticipated. As he says it at some point, “Only in New York!” So yeah, it gave a freshness and new flavour to the story we were telling in a way that only a city like New York could. And maybe there’s only one city like New York, and that’s New York.
Speaking of New York City, you seem to have found your own Hotel Intercontinental from John Wick! There’s Peter Dinklage assembling a host of assassins, including Uma Thurman, the OG assassin from Kill Bill (2003) days. How was that like?
It was amazing! It was an assembly of unsavoury superheroes. It felt like Dexter got transported to a twisted superhero movie. But it was incredible. I was pinching myself to see Uma Thurman in the room, and Peter, Neil Patrick Harris, David Dastmalchian, Krystan Ritter, Eric Stonestreet — just an ensemble of fantastic, and very different, actors. All of them were relishing the chance to exist in this heightened, crazy world. It was very gratifying for us that we were able to attract people of this calibre to join us. It was a blast, one of the richest ensembles I’ve ever been a part of.
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Since you lost your father when you were just 11, is there something that Michael sees of himself in Dexter’s son Harrison?
There’s been a father-son dynamic at play in a lot of work I’ve done, and certainly in Dexter. I consider my own relationship with my father when I think of Dexter’s relationship with Harry. Portraying a relationship with a son, who thought he lost his father and then reappearing on him — and then reappearing on him once again in the context of this show — yes, there’s a resonance in terms of my own story. I don’t think have to think about it explicitly. That’s all just in me and a part of my experience of life. So any simulation of a father-son relationship is going to be informed by that. Yeah, there’s some soothing, therapeutic element in this ritual where I’m telling this fictional story about a father and a son, given my own relationship with my pretty-much internalized, absent-from-this-Earth father. But yeah, it’s all in the mix.
