Inside Michael C. Hall’s ‘Dexter’ Return
[This story contains major spoilers from the premiere of Dexter: Original Sin.]
The last time Dexter viewers saw Dexter Morgan, the starring serial killer played by Michael C. Hall was dead.
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In the final episode of Showtime’s 2022 Dexter revival series, Dexter: New Blood, Dexter asked his grown-up son Harrison (played by Jack Alcott) to kill him in hopes of stopping the cycle and giving Harrison a better life. So, Harrison shoots him in the chest. “You did good,” were Dexter’s last words, as he bleeds in the snow in upstate New York. “Let me die so my son can live,” said Hall in voiceover to close out the series.
When talking after about why he killed off his antihero in the finale, called “Sins of the Father,” Dexter‘s former showrunner and New Blood creator Clyde Phillips, who departed the original series halfway through its eight-season run, explained why they owed it to the Dexter audience to kill him.
“After the bad taste in their mouth that a lot of people had at the end of season eight — what we’re calling the ‘first finale’ [of Dexter, which ended in 2013 and saw him faking his death and disappearing to the middle of nowhere with a new identity] — we knew that to have Dexter escape and have him continue doing this, the show was done. The storytelling of it was done,” Phillips explained to The Hollywood Reporter at the time. “The legitimacy, honesty, dignity and integrity of the character of Dexter that we so carefully built up over a almost a decade almost required that we end the show this way. We wanted the viewers to hopefully be sad by this loss and feel satisfied and to understand that this had to happen; that this was inevitable.”
So Dexter is dead, right? Well, not anymore.
The first minutes of Dexter: Original Sin reveal that Dexter Morgan lives. The Showtime prequel series, which began streaming its weekly 10-episode season on Friday, follows Dexter (played in an appearance by Hall) as he’s transported from the snow to a hospital, where doctors bring him back to life after catastrophic blood loss from a gunshot wound.
“I’ve experienced death so many times, but never my own,” says Hall as Dexter in voiceover, as his heart begins to beat again. “It really is like they say: Your life flashes before your eyes.”
The prequel series was first announced in early 2023 amid Showtime’s plans to expand its successful franchises. As the series began to take shape, Hall, who is an executive producer on Original Sin, was confirmed to be returning to voice the inner monologue of Dexter, who is played by star Patrick Gibson in the prequel series.
But the fact that future Dexter is actually alive and well was kept secret until now.
Speaking to THR now years later, Phillips offers a simple reason as to why he and Hall decided to change Dexter’s fate and reopen the franchise’s legacy. It also involves the sequel series, Dexter: Resurrection, coming in summer 2025, with Hall starring once again as Dexter.
“When I wrote that [New Blood] finale — which was the most watched single episode in the history of Showtime, by the way — the internet went insane over it. Because they loved Dexter so much and they love Michael Hall so much,” Phillips recalls about the big reaction to Dexter’s death. “I wanted to take out ads at the time that said: ‘I only had Michael Hall for one year.’ Back when we did New Blood, I only had him for one year.”
He continues, “I didn’t want him going off to prison or disappearing into the fog or any of that business [in the finale], so I decided to be bold about it. The internet hated it.”
Then, he got a call from Hall.
“Michael came back to me and said, ‘You know what, Dexter’s in my bones; Dexter’s in your bones, Clyde. Let’s keep going. Can you figure out a way to make it happen?’ And I did,” he says.
Phillips even shares a scientific explanation as to how Dexter survived the gunshot. “As we will learn at the beginning of Resurrection, if Dexter had been shot on a summer’s day, he would have died. But he was shot in zero-degree temperature in the snow. He didn’t bleed out and they were able to save him. That’s how we were able to resurrect him.”
So if Original Sin is the flashback now playing out in present-day Dexter’s mind, Resurrection will be what happens when Dexter sits up in that hospital bed.
“You could almost consider Resurrection the next season of New Blood,” says Phillips.
After the opening present-day flash-forward, Original Sin heads back to 1991 Miami where viewers meet the younger 20-year-old Dexter Morgan played by Gibson. Molly Brown takes on the role of his sister Deb, who was inhabited by Jennifer Carpenter in the first two series; and Christian Slater plays his father, Harry, who was previously played by James Remar. All of the other familiar Dexter characters are there, too: Detective Angel Batista (James Martinez), forensic analyst Vince Masuka (Alex Shimizu) and Detective Maria LaGuerta (Christina Milian). There are also several new characters in the Miami Metro offices played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, Patrick Dempsey and Reno Wilson.
“What a challenge to find someone to play young Michael C., Hall, to play young Dexter,” says Phillips, who credits casting director John Papsidera (Yellowstone, 1883, 1923) for doing a worldwide sweep to find Gibson, the 29-year-old Ireland-born actor viewers will recognize from The OA, The Darkest Minds and Shadow & Bone. “We were looking at tapes until we went blind, and [Paddy] just popped out. I immediately brought him into the studio, sat with him for about an hour. He looked great. He’s in great shape; he’s Michael C. Hall’s size. And he’s a big fan of the show. We watched him work and we knew we had what we were looking for. I’ve never been able to say this before in my career: We got all our first choices.”
The first episode of Dexter-the-killer’s origin story is an endless callback to the original series that is sure to delight the most devoted of Dexter fans. From the first swat at the mosquito in the updated title sequence that pays frame-by-frame homage to the original opener to the introduction of Dexter’s birth mom, his and Harry’s “code” and even his first kill (which prompts Gibson’s first fourth-wall break to look at the camera), Dexter nostalgia is everywhere.
“We had this canon of lore from nine seasons of the show from which to draw and, if people like Easter eggs, this show is going to be an Easter egg hunt,” says Phillips. “We would write the shows, start shooting them and someone would come in and say, ‘I have this great story about an Easter egg,’ and we would run down to set and put a picture on somebody’s desk or whatever it is that the fans are just going to love.”
Viewers will soon realize that the show is set in two timelines. Original Sin takes place mainly in the 1990s with Dexter the burgeoning serial killer, who takes on a forensics internship at his father’s homicide department, Miami Metro, under the watch of department head Tanya Martin (Gellar) and Captain Aaron Spencer (Dempsey). But the series also follows a younger Harry (still played by Slater) in a second timeline two decades earlier.
“We don’t look at them as flashbacks,” Phillips explains. “We look at it as the show taking place in two time periods: 1991, when Dexter was 20, and 1973 when Harry was doing that undercover case where he met Dexter at 2 years old.”
The 1973 timeline is where Harry meets and establishes his relationship with Dexter’s biological mother, Laura Moser (played by Brittany Allen), who will go on to be brutally murdered in front of Dexter and his brother as young boys, leading to Harry adopting Dexter, which is a core memory in Dexter canon. “That 1973 story bolsters the information of what goes on in the 1991 part of the show,” Phillips adds.
The biggest revelation in the 1973 timeline comes when viewers learn that Harry had a biological son who tragically drowned in the family’s swimming pool under Harry’s watch, before 2-year-old Dexter came into his life. That’s something that viewers, and even adult Dexter, never knew about.
“That would affect every decision you make for the rest of your life, and you would do everything you possibly could to protect and save your child in the future,” Slater tells THR of how learning about how this tragedy helps to explain why Harry risked everything for his son and developed the “code” (for Dexter to kill people who deserve to be eliminated from society and never get caught). “That was definitely one of the strongest motivating factors for choices that Harry makes.”
Slater says he hasn’t yet spoken to Remar, but has always been a huge fan. “What he did with this character has made what we do possible,” he says, adding that Origin Sin is now “an opportunity to learn so much more about Harry. To learn about his traumas and the guilt and the shame that he feels for some of the choices that he makes when he was a younger man. All of those choices and decisions lead to how he feels about his son and the direction he pushes him in, but he’s a character who expresses unconditional love.”
If all goes well, Phillips says he plans for both Original Sin and Resurrection to run for multiple seasons. “The buzz is very good and I’m hopeful,” says Phillips of Original Sin. Resurrection, meanwhile, starts production in January. It’s a rare feat for a prequel and a sequel to release so closely, let alone for both series to enjoy alternating runs, if they get renewed. “It would go in a push-me, pull-you of me having to basically be on two coasts at the same time,” he says, expressing his optimism, “but I’m privileged to do this for a living and I’m happy to do it.”
Gibson says he would be “stoked” to continue playing his young Dexter for more seasons to come, which is why this first season of Original Sin can be viewed as a coming-of-age serial killer story. The first episode sees Dexter fan-boying over famous serial killers like Ted Bundy, the Night Stalker, BTK and the Zodiac Killer, while struggling with the two sides to himself that he so adeptly straddles in the later Dexter (until it all unravels). Despite successfully going through with his first, very bloody kill — and keeping a trophy that is sure to come back and haunt him — Dexter also harnesses his bloodthirsty urges to save his intoxicated sister from a possible sexual assault.
“Although so much happens and there’s a real arc to this season, it was important to me that there was still quite a journey for Dexter to go on to become the Dexter that we know,” Gibson tells THR. “You will see him definitely learn from the lessons. I don’t think he’s somebody who makes the same mistakes twice; he’s very thorough. But there are still a plethora of lessons to come his way.”
He continues, “He hasn’t quite developed his persona. Because when you are a psychopath, it really is an act that you work on and refine. And that mask, you’ll see as the show goes on, starts to become a little more like the Dexter we know, but still has a ways to go.”
As Original Sin goes on, watching the prequel feels like watching an old episode of Dexter, but with new faces. “There’s not a kill in every episode, but there’s somebody who is about to be killed in every episode. There’s a killer in almost every one,” says Phillips of what viewers can expect from the rest of the season. “There is what we call the Big Bad who is terrorizing Miami, and Dexter ends up taking that person out. Kind of like how John Lithgow was the Big Bad as the Trinity Killer. There’s always a Big Bad.”
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Dexter: Original Sin releases new episodes weekly, streaming Fridays on Paramount+ With Showtime followed by a linear premiere Sunday night at 10 p.m. on Showtime. Read THR‘s round up of all of the Easter eggs in the prequel.
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