Michael C Hall interview

Actor Michael C Hall talks about his cancer treatment, losing his dad at age 11 and whether his serial-killing TV character is an avenging superhero or just evil personified.

Michael C Hall, photo David White

“It’s there always, this dark passenger.
When he’s driving, I feel alive.”

Dinner with Dexter. Well, my daughter was impressed. And this is as close as one is likely to get, God willing, to the experience of breaking bread with a charming and pitiless serial killer. The restaurant is packed with press and PR. I only manage to exchange a few words out the back, where Michael C Hall is obligingly having his picture taken with thrilled kitchen staff. Disappointingly, no one thinks of hunting out the meat cleaver.

Dexter Morgan. He’s an almost impossibly problematic character, even by US cable television standards. A blood-spatter expert with the Miami-Dade police, Dexter moonlights as the sort of guy who feels naked without two rolls of duct tape, 80lb of plastic sheeting and a surgical saw. Michael C Hall, it turns out, is a fairly regular guy who enjoys a glass of red wine, finishes all his dinner and is one of the last to leave the meet and greet.

When we sit down for a proper chat, he’s pleasant and polite enough to try to stifle a yawn – he was up just after dawn and has been doing this all day. Though there’s something a little unnerving about him, even in the absence of any visible duct tape. He’s disarmingly boyish, his manner enigmatic. The slightly Southern drawl – he was born in North Carolina – is sardonic. The overall effect is one part cherub, two parts Chucky. “I’ve got a little nose and I kinda look like a nice guy,” he drawls sardonically. “But if I do that …” – pause as he makes a small but blood-chilling adjustment to his affect – “I look like maybe I could kill you.” Yikes.

I’d spoken to him a few years earlier and we pick up pretty much where we left off then, bickering over whether he – Dexter, not Hall – is evil. You must allow for the backstory. As a baby Dexter witnessed the hacking to death of his mother and was left crying in a pool of blood. He had his youthful compulsion to kill channelled by his policeman foster father (the irony) so that he executes only very bad people. Still, we are asked to empathise with a man who enjoys cling-filming his victims to a gurney and taking to them with power tools that don’t entirely drown out their muffled moans of terror.

“I don’t think of him as evil. I think of him as taking unique responsibility for a darker compulsion,” insists Hall, with practised ease. Some would say what Dexter does is evil. “Some would,” he sails on. “And some would also say, ‘Hey, if he’s killing killers, he’s saving as many lives as he’s ending.’” Hall concedes that sort of thing is probably best left to a God, not a likeable hobbyist. “It’s not a person’s right or prerogative to make those sorts of decisions. And I’d be inclined to agree with that. But I’m not in the business of judging, as a person, and certainly not the characters I play.” He’s beginning to sound a little grumpy.

“I have standards,” Dexter says. Hitler and Osama bin Laden had standards. Surely civilisation relies on a social contract that says we will not hack each other to bits. “Yeah, fair enough. People describe Dexter as a vigilante of sorts. I don’t think he thinks of himself that way. He’s basically managing a very formidable impulse,” he says, a little wearily. “You could argue that he’s an agent of God’s vengeance.” He’s referring to the poster in which Dexter appears with blood-spatter wings. “The avenging angel returns!” I’m not entirely sure he’s joking.

‘There’s a lot of water under the bridge,” says Hall, of Dexter as we find him in season six. “A lot more trauma that he’s been through.” Some water under the bridge, too, for Hall. Since we last spoke, he married and parted from on-screen foster sister Jennifer Carpinter. And he suffered a serious illness. The beanie he wore when he collected his Golden Globe last year wasn’t a fashion statement. “I discovered I had Hodgkin’s [lymphoma] in the midst of shooting the 10th of 12 episodes of the fourth season.” It took him until the end of the season to decide on a course of treatment. “All the initial staging, x-rays and whatnot. I would have started treatment four or five days earlier, but I started the day after we wrapped and had completed treatment and gone into remission by the time the fifth season started.”

His only concession was to have a wig made. “My hair hadn’t really started to grow back. It grew back darker and very curly and thicker – I wish it had stayed that way – but I just stuck with the wig. But yeah, we didn’t miss a beat in terms of our schedule,” he says valiantly.

Work helped. “It was really nice to be able to have something to just dive right into. The treatment itself is something you commit to, lean into and get through. It’s when it’s over that maybe whatever you didn’t allow yourself to luxuriate in starts to creep in. That’s why I was glad to have something to do. Just have a sense of life having movement again.”

Nothing like being someone else for taking you out of yourself: “True. Initially, acting was a necessary escape because of how I grew up or who I inherently am.” Now, he sees things differently. “Rather than a chance to escape myself, as a chance to confront myself in ways I wouldn’t otherwise be forced to.” Such as? “What I’d like to confront next? I don’t know. You grapple with what it’s time to face. I’ve been lucky enough to work on material that has allowed me to think of it that way.”

True, both of his best-known characters – uptight gay undertaker David Fisher in the superb Six Feet Under and Dexter – are haunted by lost dads. Or, as Hall puts it, “They both have fundamental issues with internalised father energy.” He has thought about this. Hall’s father died when he was 11. “So a lot of my internal life has been defined by grappling with an internalised relationship with him.” Hall turned 39 while he was being treated for cancer. His father died of cancer, aged 39. “When I got the diagnosis, I was almost bemused, as much as anything. It was like, ‘Really? Huh. That kind of makes sense.’” You attract what you attract, he says. “There aren’t any coincidences.”

Hall uses the word “grappling” a lot. So it’s nice that season six begins with a bit of fun. Sort of. Dexter is now a solo dad having to, well, grapple with the foreign concept of spirituality and hunting the sort of creepy religious nutter who (worst sight on television, ever) sews live snakes into the abdomen of his victim. “It’s like, ‘Really? You actually have a season with a fanatic with a spiritual relationship to God?’ I mean, it sounds like death,” says Hall, of this unholy mix of gore and God. “And yet the show itself has always been a dicey proposition.” He likes Dexter’s subversion: “It inspires us to root for someone who’s rooting out something that we want to be rooted out. But he’s doing it by doing the things that we want rooted out, so it’s tricky,” he says, making his character sound like a sort of cross between an avenging superhero and a rather lethal landscape gardener.

“I’m all for things that polarise people,” says Hall. Inevitably there have been controversies. There were suggestions of possible copycat killings. The arrival at Toys“R”Us of a Dexter doll, complete with tiny saw (R18!) had appalled parents imagining having to explain to their child what the tiny rubbish bag was for. Hall isn’t aware of a lot of complaints. He has done his bit by making his character so endearing despite everything that resistance is futile.

But those snakes. “Oh yeah,” says Hall, brightening visibly at the thought of that deeply revolting moment. It was such an outrageous conflation of phobias, a viewer didn’t know when to start hyperventilating. Who thinks up these things and can they possibly be right in the head? “I guess we’re all a little off, us Dexter folk,” says Hall breezily. “The writers’ room, yeah, they really are charged to mine the darker sides of their imagination.”

The saving grace, if such an expression can be used, has always been the show’s humour, sharp as one of Dexter’s tools of the trade. In the snake episode he does away with the annoying guy in his class who was mean to him and went on to marry and murder his only school friend. Well, anyone who went to school can relate to that. “Mmmm,” purrs Hall. “That guy everybody hated.”

And we have Dexter very much a fish out of water at his high school reunion. You don’t need to be a serial killer to struggle with appearing normal while line dancing to You Can’t Touch This. “What is Hammer time?” wonders Dexter, innocently. “And how does it differ from regular time?”

Hilarious. Or as Hall puts it, “I relished a chance to re-establish the potential for levity, because the show’s just not as palatable without it.” Well, he’s allowed to get a bit earnest. Hall is a mesmerisingly good actor who works hard. As Six Feet Under’s David Fisher, he shared the limelight with a large ensemble cast. On Dexter, his character takes a huge amount of the load. “Exactly,” he says. “It’s on his, or my, shoulders. It’s a lot.”

There must be times, you imagine, when Dexter feels like Hall’s very own dark passenger. “Sometimes I feel like it ages me, like a president,” he allows. “When seasons end, I’m glad. I’m ready. I’m running on fumes.” Not that he’s complaining about this dream nightmare role. If he’d been a television actor before this golden age of cable, he might have been playing Marcus Welby, MD. “I know! Even when I was in grad school training to hopefully have a career as an actor, this wasn’t even on my radar as a possibility. These kinds of opportunities just didn’t exist.”

And there is life apart from the show. ”It’s not year round. Thankfully there’s plenty of time to do other things, or nothing. Or to take advantage of first-class tickets to places like New Zealand,” he drawls, stifling a yawn. “It’s not so bad.”

Meanwhile, season by season – there will be a seventh – Dexter’s becoming a bit more human. Say what you like about him, he’s an excellent dad. But his appalling extracurricular activities, his darkness, are thrown into even starker relief when, after a murder, he goes home and tucks in little Harrison. “Yeah, it becomes a dicier and dicier proposition,” says Hall happily.

You can see why he doesn’t want to judge his brilliant but ultimately fairly indefensible alter ego. When he’s playing Dexter, he can’t afford to agonise. ”He wouldn’t have the capacity to act. It would be Hamlet.” Come to think of it, Shakespeare has some right evil bastards. But in the end, this is just television. “It’s all smoke and mirrors,” says Hall. “I just keep turning up.”

DEXTER, SoHo, Tuesday, 8.30pm.