The Showtime revival premieres Sunday, Nov. 7.
Michael C. Hall reintroduces himself as Dexter Morgan in Showtime's continuation of the hit drama, Dexter: New Blood. For Hall, reacclimating himself into this world again after nearly a decade was fate in regard to the timing of the resurrection of the beloved serial killer.
"It has everything to do with how much time has passed and that the story hinges on the relationship between Dexter and his son. And his son is now a full-grown young man -- or almost [a] young man," Hall told ET's Matt Cohen during a recent Zoom interview ahead of the premiere of New Blood. "Why now is the question. Ultimately we had to wait for Harrison to grow up and I think taking this much time away allows the return to the character feel like a bit of a surprise, but it hasn’t been so much time that people have completely put it so far in the rearview that they don’t even remember it."
New Blood finds the r̶e̶f̶o̶r̶m̶e̶d̶ serial killer living a quiet life in the fictional small town of Iron Lake, Minnesota, and going under the nondescript, low-key name of Jim Lindsay. The good news: Dexter, or Jim rather, hasn't killed in almost 10 years. The bad news: the temptation is always a bloody paper cut away. Hall reminisced about the experience of returning to a character he hasn't played in a while, confessing that "it was a trip."
"It was really wild. I didn’t know really what to expect but I found that once I showed up and started shooting that he was still very, very much alive," Hall recalled. "He was still very familiar. He is obviously in a completely different context [and] has come a long way from where we left him but he was still very available to me, which was reassuring and creepy."
But obviously, life for Dexter now looks very different from what it looked like back then. And that, Hall hinted, is going to be key for how New Blood stands out from the original run of the series, which ran for eight seasons and 96 episodes from 2006 to 2013.
"I think the biggest difference was the fundamental differences that in these eight years or near decade since we left him, he hasn’t killed anybody. He has been abstinent. He's been dedicated to this sober life and has managed it in this very isolated way," the 50-year-old actor and executive producer said. "He's a guy who is dead to himself as far as he is concerned, but as you can imagine, the cameras are turning back on probably because he is going to come back to life."
And Hall promises that New Blood undoes a lot of what has plagued viewers' minds all these years after the original series' controversial ending in 2013, which saw Dexter faking his own death and living under an assumed identity as a lumberjack in Oregon.
"I totally get people's dissatisfaction with the way the show ended 'cause it didn't really end. It just left us in this pretty unresolved funny certain place and while I thought that it made sense for the character to find himself in that position and to put himself in this self-imposed exile after all the chaos after the show, I would get why it was pretty unsatisfying... [and] infuriating for fans," Hall said. "They spent all this time and were longing for something that answered some questions or tied some things up or did something that the finale didn't manage to do. But if nothing else, it did set the stage for what we've been up to for the last several months in this new show, so maybe that's the silver lining."
The desire to give fans proper closure to Dexter was "absolutely" a factor in Hall wanting to reprise the role.
"Just as I knew that the show didn't sit that well in its finale with viewers, it didn't sit that well with me and I felt like I owed it to myself to explore it further if it came up. That it made sense and it did and owed it to the character and owed it to the fans for sure," he said.
New Blood is being billed as a 10-episode "event series," and also stars Julia Jones, Alano Miller, Johnny Sequoyah and Jack Alcott. Returning to the series are Jennifer Carpenter as Deb and John Lithgow as the Trinity Killer.
Dexter: New Blood premieres Sunday, Nov. 7 on Showtime. For more, watch below.
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