Dexter has earned a great send off. Now, with Dexter: New Blood, premiering today on Starzplay Arabia in the Middle East, he may finally get it.
Let’s flashback. In 2006, Michael C Hall followed up his acclaimed role in Six Feet Under with what would become one of the most iconic television performances of the century. With Dexter, a serial killer who hunts serial killers, tortured by his drive to kill, Hall not only won massive ratings and a huge fanbase, he became television’s top leading man, winning a Golden Globe for Best Actor in 2010.
Eight years ago, in 2013, the show aired its series finale, which became widely criticized by fans for being equal parts confounding and unsatisfying, hurting the show’s legacy and leading many to cry out for a proper finale.
Now, with Dexter: New Blood, Hall has returned to give fans what they have long clamoured for. With the new series, he’s teamed with the series’s original showrunner Clyde Phillips to pick up where the show left off and right the wrong that had been nagging at the show’s fans.
But this is not just for the fans. In fact, Michael C Hall opened up to Esquire Middle East about his personal dissatisfaction with the ending, and why he felt now was the time for the show to return, and why it has once again found its peak form.
Read the full conversation below, or watch it here.
We know what the show means to the fans coming back, to right a wrong in some people’s eyes. But what does it mean for you personally to come back to this character? What’s the drive inside of you?
Is it really about pleasing those fans, or is there something that you wanted to continue for you?
I think there are plenty of areas in which the audience’s experience of the way the show ended and my own intersect, to be honest. I think there are ways in which it was dissatisfying, and also just open ended. I think certain questions remain and sort and certain storytelling opportunities were there, especially after a certain amount of time had passed. There were opportunities having largely to do with the fact that Harrison is on the cusp of becoming a young man, and if he were to track his father down, what would that be like? You know what I mean?
I also had the broad spectrum experience when it comes to TV finales, because I did the Six Feet Under finale, which is widely considered–
The Six Feet Under finale was the Six Feet Under finale. It’s a classic.
Yeah, exactly. I went from one of the most loved, greatest finales to one of the most confounding if not hated finales, in the case of Dexter. So I can compare and contrast the experience of the satisfying closure that I had when Six Feet Under ended, versus a serious experience of something much more open ended, in the case of Dexter. I think ever since it ended, there’s been some hope that some story would reveal itself or emerge that felt worth telling and allow me to deal with that feeling.
Here’s a question I’m sure you’ve asked yourself a lot. What does make a great ending?
I don’t know, honestly. There are endings that are definitive, wrap everything up in a bow, there are endings that are definitive in ways that are totally surprising and reveal some fundamental detail that you hadn’t been aware of, like in The Usual Suspects. There are endings like my one of my favorite movies, Cache, the Michael Haneke movie, which just ended on this static image populated very far away of these characters that we’ve come to know that are relatively peripheral, the sons of these fundamental characters and we have no sense of what they’re talking about. It’s completely ambiguous and gray in a way that’s deeply satisfying.
I like an ending that both answers something definitively or give some sort of sense of having arrived somewhere, but also cracks open the world presented by the show or the movie in a new way and leaves you to contend with new considerations or questions. I don’t know, I mean there’s no right answer. I don’t seem to be able to get the end of that answer.
And how did that inform the way you guys approached Dexter: New Blood? What’s the right ending for Dexter is the real question I’m sure you had to ask.
So was that conversation ‘we need to come up with something that’s going to please these fans, we need to make sure that I’m not asked for the next 40 years of my life about an ending’? Or was this about making it feel right for yourselves?
Yeah, I mean, again, I don’t know that those things are mutually exclusive. But our focus at least consciously was not on doing something that would please people it was more just revisiting and dealing honestly with who we understood this character to be in the new world in which we found find him in.
How did you feel once it was over?
I felt good. I felt satisfied. I felt like I had landed on the ground after having been in a state of some sort of unacknowledged suspended animation for eight years. I felt—not to say that there won’t be more. Who knows? [laughs] But, no, I felt a sense of satisfaction that we had done a good job telling the story that we decided to tell.
Can’t wait to see how it ends. And thank you so much for that.
Dexter: New Blood is now streaming on Starzplay Arabia in the Middle East