'I can't imagine having to live Dexter's life. It's awful'

Actor Michael C Hall talks to Louis Chilton about his own ‘origin story’, why he didn’t mind that ‘Six Feet Under’ was underappreciated, and his views on the new ‘Dexter’ revival

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“It was never part of any mission statement I had,” insists Michael C Hall, “playing characters who are, in one way or another, surrounded by dead bodies.” He smiles, shrewdly. “But it’s just sort of how it went down.” It’s true - at this point, the 54-year-old American actor has spent roughly two and a half decades rubbing shoulders with corpses, first as David Fisher, the uptight, gay mortician in HBO’s coruscatingly morbid TV gem Six Feet Under, and then, in an on-and-off 20-year run, as Miami-based serial killer Dexter Morgan, who supplied many of the cadavers himself.

Hall is speaking to me from his home in North Carolina, days before the premiere of Dexter: Resurrection, a new series reviving his killer-with-a-code. Even condensed to the size of a laptop screen, his face is a great, telegenic one. Arching, mischievous eyebrows complicate the effect of his hard-angled leading-man jawline: throw in a smirk and some mood lighting, and the whole thing becomes quite benignly devilish. It’s the face of a man born to play everyone’s favourite murderer.

The original Dexter finished its initial eight-season run in 2013, with an episode that made waves for all the wrong reasons: in a stroke of aleatoric TV-finale logic, Hall’s character faked his own death and moved to Oregon to become a lumberjack. “Remember the Monsters?” has been cited among the worst finales ever made, and Hall himself has described it as “pretty unsatisfying and infuriating for fans”. So eight years later, he revisited the character for Dexter: New Blood, a frosty sequel miniseries set in rural upstate New York. That series ended starkly, with Dexter being shot dead by his teenage son Harrison. What Resurrection presupposes is: what if he wasn’t?