Dexter Morgan knows what the end feels like, and he’s not too keen on it. The morally minded serial killer portrayed by Michael C. Hall first showed up in Showtime’s eponymous drama series Dexter, in the thick of the late-2000s antihero boom alongside Walter White (Breaking Bad) and Don Draper (Mad Men). The hit show ran for eight seasons before reaching a widely maligned conclusion, in which Dexter decided to fake his own death and go live as a lumberjack in a secluded mountain town. Hall then reprised the role in a sequel series, New Blood, which ended with Dexter seemingly actually dying—at the hands of his son, Harrison (Jack Alcott). That finale was fairly divisive too.
Still—dead is dead, right? Not quite, it turns out. “We thought it would be the end, but he’s a remarkably resilient guy, so the possibility was always—at least for me—percolating,” Hall says over Zoom. He’s speaking to me on break from a day of production on Dexter: Resurrection, whose title should tell you that New Blood was not, in fact, the end. Hall reiterates that he personally pushed to bring his signature character back to TV. He called Clyde Phillips, Dexter’s original showrunner and New Blood’s creator, to see what could be done. Here’s how Phillips remembers the pitch: “Michael said, ‘Dexter is in my bones, and I know what’s in your bones, Clyde. Can you figure out a way to undo what we did at the end of New Blood? Is there a way to make him survive?’” Within a week, Phillips and fellow executive producer Scott Reynolds came up with an idea. They told Hall it was a yes.
They put a Resurrection writers’ room together while shooting Original Sin, a prequel starring Patrick Gibson as Dexter in his 20s, set about 15 years before the events of the initial series. Sin’s first season, which concluded in February (it’s been renewed for a second season), has turned out to be a crucial text. It’s narrated by Hall’s Dexter in the immediate aftermath of New Blood; as he’s revived by doctors, his life flashes before his (or really, our) eyes. He looks back on how he got into the killing-for-justice game in the first place. “The character was severely traumatized by a lot of what happened to him in the original incarnation, and is only now at a place where he’s able to shed that,” Hall says. “Spending time with that [Original Sin] material helped embroider and color in what was maybe a line drawing or an outline that I had in my mind from the beginning—so it’s a tool for us.”
Premiering this summer on Paramount+ With Showtime, Resurrection takes place a few weeks after New Blood and is framed by the intense dynamic between father and son. Dexter chases a missing Harrison to New York City, where David Zayas’s Captain Angel Batista is hot on their trail from way down in Miami. Zayas is far from the only original cast member returning: “John Lithgow and Jimmy Smits will be in for a minute,” Phillips says, referring to their beloved respective roles of the Trinity Killer and ADA Miguel Prado. Dexter’s late adoptive father, Harry, who instilled the code of killing in his son, will return in ghost form, again portrayed by James Remar. Then there’s the matter of Harrison—safe to say, he’ll play a prominent role.
“Dexter has a lot of hesitation about making contact, which is a fundamental part of the tension that is pervasive for the first bit of the season,” Hall says. “Harrison revealed himself to be, and remains, an all-the-more potent connection to Dexter’s tiny sense of humanity. He craves it, in spite of himself, so it’s a major bolt of thread running through his interior life and the life of the season.” Phillips adds that Dexter’s search for his son intersects with the reemergence of his father’s physical memory: “Dexter finds Harrison fairly quickly, then he asks Harry, ‘Do I reveal myself to him? Is it going to screw him up to have a zombie dad?’” At the “dramatically right moment,” Phillips teases, father and son resume contact. “Dexter is determined to make sure that he has a solid—and more importantly honest and loving—relationship with his son.”
And then there are the new cast additions: Neil Patrick Harris, Krysten Ritter, Eric Stonestreet, and more will appear in guest roles, while new adversaries include Emmy winner Peter Dinklage as a billionaire venture capitalist with a dark side and Oscar nominee Uma Thurman as his mysterious head of security. “When Uma first came to the set, the whole set changed—in walks this movie star, and she has presence,” Phillips says. “But nobody gets a call sheet like this, particularly on a TV show. I guess it shows that we’re more than just a TV show. People want to work with Michael.”
A native of North Carolina, Hall completed his MFA at New York University to begin the pursuit of an acting career. “It’s where I, I suppose, came of age,” he says. It feels special to be again reprising the role of Dexter Morgan not just anywhere, but in the place where his dream took root. “I’m in the midst of something I only once imagined, shooting something like this, with a role like this, on location in New York City,” he says. “It’s important to remind yourself that while you’re very much wide awake in the present, you’re simultaneously in the midst of what was once a dream.”
Although Hall has pulled off acclaimed, significant work onstage and onscreen both before and after Dexter—coleading HBO’s groundbreaking Six Feet Under, doing Cabaret and Hedwig on Broadway—he’s long been most closely associated with his chilly, terrifying, strangely vulnerable turn as TV’s most honorable serial killer. For his performance, he won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award, and received five Emmy nominations. (He earned another Emmy nod for best drama series as a producer.) “Why would an audience invite a serial killer to their home every Sunday night? He kills for good, he has a code, he does all of that—but it’s Michael,” Phillips says. “His voiceover brings a relatability, a vulnerability, and shows a whole other side to the process that we absorb and honor and believe—and, I think, we’re hungry for more.
I ask Hall if he felt any reluctance about jumping back into the character, especially since it required an “undoing,” as he described it, of where he’d previously left him. “None that in any way serves me at the present—I’m probably dispositionally addicted to ambivalence, but no,” he replies. “It’s a special thing to be onto something that continues to give you something back. Ultimately, any misgivings were overwhelmed by relishing the idea of him rising from his self-imposed ashes.”
In our interview, both Hall and Phillips sound energized by what they call at various points a “second chance” and a “new beginning.” They’re all over New York, “a place where you can be lost and found,” as Phillips puts it. “Dexter for a while was lost, and now he’s found himself again.” The same logic might just apply to where Phillips and co. find themselves at the moment, deep in production on Resurrection. They can imbue the psychological insights of Original Sin, expand on the narrative building blocks of New Blood, and return to what made Dexter so distinctive in the first place.
“This show can end up being an Easter egg hunt for the OG fans, but we’re also making it a fresh new show. If people haven’t seen the show before, they can come in and watch a fully formed television series,” Phillips says.
Do Hall and Phillips view Resurrection as a limited, one-off series? They respond defiantly. “We’ve got the strongest franchise in Showtime’s history, and we plan to do this for years,” Phillips says. Hall chimes in: “Years with an s. The thinking is not to come back for a sort of self-contained one-off again, but leave it open to further exploration. The intention, and hope, is that the story will continue beyond this.” Hell, even if that weren’t the case, Dexter Morgan is a hard guy to keep down. “He’s a much more human, flesh-and-blood version of that horror trope of someone who just refuses to go down,” Hall says. And rest assured, Hall is not complaining.
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