Celebrity Interviews

Zimbio Interview: Michael C. Hall

(Getty)We understand that Michael C. Hall wouldn’t want to talk to a bunch of people. He just got over cancer, people! But we love Dexter so we can’t help ourselves. We cornered Hall at a Showtime party for the Television Critics Association this summer. It’s not so much a season five scoop as it is just chatting with Dex.

Zimbio: The end of last season really traumatized most of us. What reactions did you hear from fans?
Michael C. Hall: The reactions are various. Some people were traumatized, horrified, exhilarated, perplexed, in a tailspin or shot out of a cannon. It’s been a lot of different things to different people I think.

Zimbio: So that’s where you begin this year.
Michael C. Hall: Well, we have to pick up and take responsibility for the real dismantling of the structure of Dexter’s world that’s happened.

Zimbio: Did you miss the possibility of having a scene where Rita finds out what Dexter does and confronts him?
Michael C. Hall: Oh, God, no. That's a horrifying prospect. The prospect of anybody close to Dexter finding out chills me to the bone.

Zimbio: Don’t you think there are one or two characters who’d be okay with it and cover for him?
Michael C. Hall: Not enough to risk letting them know actively. It never works out for the people who find out.

Zimbio: How do you like playing Dexter as a single father now?
Michael C. Hall: You know, everything that has gone beyond the first season has been uncharted waters. The fact that he is now a father is a big part of that for sure. The father he was in the fourth season is different from the father he’ll struggle to be in the fifth given that he’s now a single dad. I don't know, think the show works because it's imminently relatable and yet it's a really extreme character in the midst of relatable situations.

Zimbio: I mean, he’s kind of having emotions finally. He can’t be too happy to confront those.
Michael C. Hall: I don't know if it’s so much of a confrontation as it is an emergence of something. But, I think we can expect that he still is fundamentally stone cold crazy and is probably going to keep killing people. That’s the tightrope you have to walk. I think Dexter, when we learn what happened to him toward the end of the first season, we know that he was this innocent baby in a pool of his mother's blood having watched her die. Now Dexter is coming home finding his flesh and blood son in a pool of his wife’s, his son's mother's blood but Dexter is no longer innocent. The blood is, at least in part maybe because he didn’t kill Trinity sooner, on his hands. So it's that very thing. How do you get this malicious glee when Dexter has this gentleman sense of responsibility, guilt and potentially remorse?

Zimbio: He was already spread so thin with a wife. How can he balance his murderous activities as a single dad?
Michael C. Hall: Well, he hires a nanny. There's a lot of stuff that we don't see. Maybe he has a special, sleep triple coffin he gets in. He sleeps two hours but it feels like six.

Zimbio: Dexter interviewing nannies sounds hilarious.
Michael C. Hall: Actually, Deb takes the lead on that.

Zimbio: That seems like her territory.
Michael C. Hall: She's good with interrogating people.

Zimbio: Are you looking forward to the prospect of Dexter dating again this season or at least further down the line?
Michael C. Hall: I don't think that word is sort of in his vocabulary at this point. I don’t think he aspires to it. I'm sure Dexter will be thrust into unique relationships but I don't think he's seeking out a significant other.

Zimbio: Okay, how are you feeling now that your treatment is over and you’re back to work?
Michael C. Hall: Great. I feel good. The Hodgkin’s went in complete remission over the course of the treatment. I finished the treatment and I’m four months done with it so I feel really good.

Zimbio: What perspective does living through that give you on your life and work?
Michael C. Hall: Just gratitude. It’s really an invitation to that.

Zimbio: Now that you’re on season five, how well do you understand Dexter now?
Michael C. Hall: He’s elusive. That’s the great thing about this job. It’s never boring. He continues to evolve and change. It’s beyond anything I ever anticipated in the beginning, where we are now, the story we’re telling now, where the character is, what’s happened in his life and I’m happy with that. I felt like it had to be some sort of movement forward towards some percolating sense of his own humanity, but how that went down, I had no idea.

Zimbio: Real serial killers have groupies, women sending them letters. Do you get Dexter groupies?
Michael C. Hall: No, not at all. Everything that finds its way to me is sane. People talk about loving the show and they recognize that I'm an actor. I really don't get anything from people who seem to think that I'm him, thankfully.

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