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It seems as if Dexter Morgan just cannot die. Remember the first Dexter finale 12 years ago? It climaxed with Morgan sailing his boat into an unsurvivable storm, a sure sign that our favourite serial-killing blood spatter analyst had finally met his end. But then the show lost its nerve and he somehow ended up in a postscript with a new job (lumberjack) and a new beard (unconvincing).
Next came 2021’s Dexter: New Blood, a series that was conceived as a definitive full stop for the character. That run ended with – spoiler alert – Dexter being shot dead by his son Harrison. However, now Morgan finds himself back yet again in Dexter: Resurrection, in which we quickly learn that this apparently fatal injury was merely a flesh wound.
“Well, you know, he didn’t get shot in the head,” shrugs Michael C Hall, who plays the titular character. Hall is attempting to explain Dexter’s latest miraculous comeback to me over Zoom – and if he’s getting tired of people like me telling him that they thought he was dead, he’s doing a pretty good job of hiding it.
This might be because it was his idea to bring Dexter back. “The conversation started as a result of my saying, ‘What if he didn’t die?’” he says breezily. “I can’t take credit for the whole scope of what we’re up to, but it was a notion that I casually floated. What if the end of New Blood was something that enabled Dexter to relinquish some burden that he’d been carrying for a long time?”
What changed his mind? “Time passing, perspective shifting, recognising what a wonderful thing it is to collaborate with this family,” he says. “And realising that how New Blood seemingly ended could be a way to move the character into a place he hadn’t quite earned until then.”
How well the character moves into that place remains to be seen. As we speak, the show is still in production, and only the first episode has been made available to view. Its early scenes might creak with tortured exposition – hardly surprising, given the near-impossible task of bringing someone back from the dead – but happily, the old Dexter magic is still present. There are callbacks and cameos and grisly scenes of dismemberment. Better yet, the season promises all kinds of warped bonding between Dexter (a serial killer) and Harrison (his son and, until quite recently, murderer).
“Harrison has been through a lot, and has a sense of maturity that he didn’t have when we first met him in New Blood,” says Hall. “Dexter initially is very much compelled to check in on his son, but is also daunted by the proposition of making contact, because he’s afraid his son will reject him, or won’t want him, or will wish he’d stayed dead. But I think finding themselves on the other side of this traumatic event will result in both Dexter and his son growing up a little bit.”
We also have a new fleet of faces to look forward to. Peter Dinklage and Uma Thurman are there, respectively playing a billionaire venture capitalist and his head of security, plus Neil Patrick Harris, Eric Stonestreet, Krysten Ritter and David Dastmalchian will all appear as villains invited to what sounds an awful lot like an international murder convention. “Dexter sort of trips into a literal and figurative invitation to a gathering of unsavoury …” teases Hall of this year’s plot, before trailing off for fear of spoiling anything. “Actually, I’m not sure how much I can say. But it’s really validating and gratifying, the fact that the show remains compelling to the kinds of actors who’ve agreed to join us.”
Perhaps another reason for Hall’s willingness to return was this year’s Dexter: Original Sin. A prequel series that took the form of Dexter’s life flashing before his eyes post-shooting, Original Sin didn’t star Hall (although he provided the voiceover), instead casting Shadow and Bone’s Patrick Gibson as Morgan.
I had wondered if the simple envy of seeing someone else do his job drove Hall back to Dexter, but apparently this wasn’t the case. “I thought it was interesting, once all those blanks had been filled in, to find the character on the other side of it,” he says. “But it was weird to see Patrick embody some of what had evolved as Dexter’s characteristic ways of being. Yes, it’s very strange. In fact, at one point I was like, when I go back to work, I gotta make sure I’m not just doing a Patrick Gibson impression.”
There will be more Original Sin (a second season was greenlit this spring): another sign of what looks like an ever-expanding Dexterverse. There’s likely to be continued Resurrection – more about that shortly – plus there are rumours of a spin-off focused on John Lithgow’s Trinity Killer. All of which perhaps underlines how much better television as a whole was in Dexter’s heyday.
The original Dexter came out in 2006 at the height of the golden age of TV, with its focus on anguished male antiheroes. Much has been made lately of the demons that plagued James Gandolfini before his death, some attributed to the burden of having to play a character as dark as Tony Soprano for so many years. As Dexter, though, Hall played a serial killer who had to murder and dismember countless people. Did the darkness of the role ever get to him?
“I think Dexter exists in a world that is, to some degree, dialled away from reality,” he explains. “It’s fantastic in its way and, because of that fantastical element, maybe it doesn’t play the same trick on me that it might otherwise. And you know, as intense as it might be to convey someone who’s wrestling with such formidable darkness, it’s maybe therapeutic. You can endow these victims with whatever it is you’d like to do away with in your own world. Maybe I’m a healthier person for having done all this.”
There is also the question of how comfortable Hall is with returning to the same character over and over again. After all, Dexter aside, his stock in trade is playing a dizzying breadth of characters – he was JFK in The Crown, the Emcee in Cabaret, the lead in David Bowie’s Lazarus musical, a professional bowler in a Tim Robinson-written episode of Documentary Now!. Yet he keeps being drawn back to Dexter. Surely he must be aware that this will be the first line of his obituary.
“I mean, what are you going to do?” he shrugs. “That’s the way it’s unfolded. Whether I were to do more of this or not, I think that would remain the case, and it’s OK. None of it fundamentally matters anyway. But it’s been really fun. Being able to work as an actor feels like getting away with something. Being able to work as an actor while playing a character like Dexter feels exponentially so. I feel very lucky to have gotten away with this.”
A knottier question to bring up is the internet. As well as the initial finale routinely being brought up as one of the worst in television history, a Hollywood Reporter interview with showrunner Clyde Phillips last year suggested that fans weren’t exactly happy with how New Blood ended, either. “The internet hated it,” Phillips said bluntly. With this in mind, I ask Hall if he keeps up with the ins and outs of reactions to the show.
“No, that would make me crazy,” he replies. “But some fans found the notion of Dexter surviving more plausible than him dying. There’s something about the character that people just don’t want to see him die. They don’t want to see his agency extinguished.”
The good news for these fans is that Dexter: Resurrection is intended to be a long-running affair. The introduction of so many guest stars this season is designed to trickle out across several years, or, as Phillips put it to USA Today, the duration of the comeback is “up to Michael”.
“Well, I guess it’s hard for Dexter to happen if I’m not there,” Hall sighs when I mention this to him. Does this mean he would like Resurrection to run and run? Is there a world where it could end up rivalling the length of the original series? “That sounds insane,” he laughs. “All I can say is that I don’t think we resolve things at the end of this season, and we’ve done it with the reasonable expectation that there will be more to come.”
So you don’t get shot at the end of this one? “We still have two and a half weeks left of filming, and I suppose someone could present some new pages to me,” he smiles. But what would be the point? After all, Dexter Morgan cannot die. And we should all be thankful for that.
