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Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter Talk Brother-Sister 'Romance'

Via: zap2it.com: In the last moments of "Dexter's" sixth season, Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) discovered her brother is a killer. So how will this affect her romantic feelings for Dexter (Michael C. Hall)?

"The fact that she had some sort of softening in terms of her conception of her relationship to her brother probably makes her prepared to struggle with the information in a way that she wouldn't have otherwise been," Hall tells Zap2it. "She's not ready to embrace him with open arms and say, 'Oh, I love you, it's OK,' but I think she's probably more open to the notion of trying to accept it or understand it."

Carpenter insists Deb's infatuation with her brother was present from "Dexter's" first season. "When we started the show, I decided that Michael's just so charming and handsome...that's going to be a terribly hard thing to ignore." (In fact, the actors were married for three years.) "So I thought, maybe I should find a way to incorporate that...So it felt like OK, that's permission for us to go ahead and see where this goes."

"When Deb walked in on him" -- in what she calls "the strangest, scariest seduction scene" -- "it was sort of like a lock opened," Carpenter says. "Suddenly my life became my own. My brother's not the person I thought he was, and my heart isn't his, either. "

When we asked Hall whether he believes Dexter is really capable of romantic love, he said, with a laugh, "Among other potentially negative things, he's pretty narcissistic. So I don't know if he's capable of true love. I'm not saying he isn't, but I'm not sure that he is...He does have this desire to be accepted, embraced, even celebrated, so [Deb's discovery] is simultaneously horrifying and a tremendous relief, I think for both characters."

"Part of the fun of the season is that he's managing a completely different can of worms with Deb," Hall concludes. "The secret is not his and his alone anymore, and it requires a certain vigilance to try manage her feelings about it."

39 comments:

  1. "Among other potentially negative things, he's pretty narcissistic. So I don't know if he's capable of true love. I'm not saying he isn't, but I'm not sure that he is...He does have this desire to be accepted, embraced, even celebrated, so [Deb's discovery] is simultaneously horrifying and a tremendous relief, I think for both characters." Well said.

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  2. I'm so disappointed that, according to Jennifer's comment ("Suddenly my life became my own. My brother's not the person I thought he was, and my heart isn't his, either."), it doesn't seem like they're going to follow through with the Deb/Dex romance. I've been looking forward to it for nearly a year!

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    1. Come on, that can mean all sorts of things. The way I see it, it only means that right st the moment, there's no telling where it would lead. Exactly the same thing would happen in real life if you found out that someone you had a crush at was not the person you thought, but the possibility would still be there, only it would be like a ball on top of a bump...will it roll left? Will it roll right? You wouldn't know at the moment, but the production team have already hinted where it's probably going to do, haven't they?

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    2. Nah, they are going to chicken out of it.

      The TV critics scared them away - owned them like little bitches.

      Z

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  3. MCH forgot to say that Dexter is going to kill Debra in 6th episode... and I must say - finally. There is no place for her in the show

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    1. Oh please, Dexter is not going to kill Debra. He killed his own brother to protect her and he rarely violates his code. He was even willing to spare Doakes! Deb has every right to be in this show. She is Dexter's foil and a compelling character in her own right.

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    2. Unfortunately, Dexter killed wrong person at the end of season 1... Brian was much more valuable/useful character than debra (for Dexter's needs). She has to die, because there is no space for solid storyline if she is alive with knowing Dexter's secret. Debra is definately the most useless character in the show.
      Some "Deb/Dex romance fantasies" are completely out of topic in context of this show. Dexter is a serial killer, do you remember?

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    3. hahahahahahah this is about the code, not a usual killer ahah

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    4. oh,,ok, in epi 6,,you just know everything,,so tell me

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    5. @ 12:04

      Good stories need conflict. If Dexter had killed Deb at the end of season one, he would have violated Harry's code in addition to murdering Harry's daughter. That would have been the ultimate rejection of "the code" and then what... He just goes on random killing sprees with Brian for the remaining seasons? That would have gotten boring. You can bet that Rita would have been out of the picture also if Brian had his way. Some of the essential conflict in the show arises from how Dexter manages his relationships while hiding the fact that he is a serial killer. Debra is the person who keeps Dexter balanced. Her highly emotional nature is the perfect foil for Dexter's lack of emotion. And the Deb/Dex romance is not out of context! In fact, Deb might be the only person who could know Dexter's secret and still love him romantically or even platonically without being a total nutjob like Lila. And there is plenty of space for a solid storyline now that she knows. In fact, her knowing has the potential to create some of the most exciting conflict we have ever seen on this show. Throw her romantic feelings into the mix and the writers have tons of terrain to explore. Dexter is a serial killer, yes, but I don't tune in for the kill of the week, I tune in to see how he manages being a serial killer while still maintaining his daily relationships, specifically his relationship with Deb, who can often be as complex and interesting a character as Dexter.

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    6. ahahah he love harrison and it is emotion ahah

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    7. @12:18
      but who wants romance? I want blood, violence, brutality and gore, not a romance. I don't give a shit about romance.
      maybe some porn would be ok

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    8. michael is very beautiful and talent for just blood, gore etc ahah
      he is the best
      i dont talking romance but more that a jason vorhees
      if to be a creep,,ther actor,,never michael

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    9. I kind of feel like they should have stuck with the book and had Dexter let Brian get away. It says something that Dexter would kill his own blood brother to protect Debra. Dexter killed someone [Brian] who was worse than himself. That decision suggests that Debra will kill Dexter to stop his desire to commit murder -- which wouldn't necessarily be a bad ending.

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  4. I'm hoping they still go for it. However, maybe she can finally have a relationship with Dexter where she isn't totally dependent on him anymore. Now that she knows his secret, she has a power that she didn't have before.

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  5. i hate this line " kill deb" dont make sense , he dont killed lumen, and doakes, and killed brian for her
    would i will stop with this show,,,not for deb, but for dont make sense,
    dexter is not so " crazy for life " ,,he dont care when is dying in the sea

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  6. some ppl thik the fake " the love for son " when he is alone thinking about it
    ? so strange

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  7. This is rather disconcerting. They better not drop it.


    lol kill Deb. If he kills her that changes the entire series, he and Brian have to go on the run. He's wanted man along with him and they still go out there, kill? He's not getting his job back for sure or starting a new life . zzz..boring.


    1:46 PM you're watching the wrong show. Hate to break it to you.

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    1. totally agree, would be other show,more like prison break ,,,
      you are the best joe

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    2. totally agree about everythint man

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    3. Joe

      I was joking above, I doubt they will just drop it.

      Sarah Colleton promised that it would be revisited later in S7 once Deb has adjust to the "real" Dexter and I believe her.

      Z

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    4. Oh, I know. I was referring to Jen's comments about it.

      "Suddenly my life became my own. My brother's not the person I thought he was, and my heart isn't his, either. "

      It sounded like she may realize he's not the guy she thought she loved in that way. Which would totally piss on the show to just be conveniently do that like - "she has deep feelings for him," "he's a killer. Nevermind." You can't do that. Especially, with the way her declaration of her feelings were made. That emotional moment of clarity of that - enough to say "cuz I'm in love with him, and she wants him to understand, and wants him to know it." That hits you to the core. She was ready to gamble on telling him - despite getting warned about his reaction. It would change their relationship forever and she wanted to.

      I heard that too about Colleton. Forgot about it actually :D. I wonder Hannah stuff stirs it up for Deb again. .

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    5. 5:08

      I am sure they will use Hannah to make Deb jealous and stir stuff up. But yes, that moment of clarity was my favorite and profound moment on the show.

      "It makes my whole life, every man I've ever loved makes sense. It's like I've always been looking for someone like Dexter, or someone who's the opposite of Dexter, as a way to avoid the fact that I am in love with him."

      That was delivered from the heart and it cut right to the bone. And for every fan who had come to understand this, who had taken the time to think it through, peek under the subtext, and mine the same gold, it was a major reward.

      Here is the way I think about things. I have taken the time in my life to read the classics of literature, to delve into music and art beyond my generation, to watch movies from the silent era to the modern era, to read everything from Socrates and Plato and Homer to Dickens and Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and Salinger... to watch films with subtitles and to read Jung and Nietzsche, and every dry book on the history of the world, rather than plopping my ass in front of a TV and watching shlock or playing video games for the majority of my life.

      I have exercised my mind vigorously, and I'll be fucking angry, if after all that work, the art I indulge in is held hostage because 50 or 60% of the viewing audience and a bunch of unqualified TV gossip columnists are intellectually lazy brats who can't comprehend basic subtext in film, or are skeeved out foster sibling love.

      Z

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    6. I think it's more like 40%.

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    7. Excellent post, Z.


      BTW 5:08 was me Joe if you didn't catch my name there. That was my reply to your reply from original post - just so you know haha.

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    8. Z, Joe, Etc.--

      (I'm the person who made the comment earlier that incorporated the disappointing quote from Jennifer.)

      I agree that it'd be absurd if the writers backed away from the romance, but there's a nonchalant finality in the way Jennifer says, "My brother's not the person I thought he was, and my heart isn't his, either." When I couple that with Colleton's careful wording in a recent interview ("...not only does she love her foster brother but she's feeling she's in love with him." She makes a point of using the word "feeling" instead of just saying, "but...she's in love with him.") I get a bad feeling about what they're going to (not) do with the romance.

      I hope they're trying to throw us a curveball by brushing it off so that it hits us harder when the season airs.

      Also, I believe that, just because Colleton says they'll address Deb's feelings later in the season, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to play out the romance--it just means that they're not going to make pretend it never happened.

      Again, I hope I'm being pessimistic, because this has been one of the best developments I've seen on television in a long time (granted, I don't watch much television, but still).

      A (I'll take Z's lead.)

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  8. many people that i know will stop watch the show if showtime cross the line about kill the sister
    so, showtime is not dumb to do it

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  9. not would be a sweet romance but something dark and cool,,i love it,weird things,,,

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  10. "It makes my whole life, every man I've ever loved makes sense. It's like I've always been looking for someone like Dexter, or someone who's the opposite of Dexter, as a way to avoid the fact that I am in love with him."

    This was the most shoddily convenient trick the Season 6 writers ever pulled in the history of the show. Jennifer's personal interpretation of Deb's feelings is fine and valid as an actress, but the writers and Showrunners showed just how much they had lost touch with the audience when they wrote this dialogue.
    They never once stopped to think that there are millions of viewers who have seen the Deb-Dex as a pure sibling relationship. After all, it's not as if they had bent the dialogue or material in any way to suggest there was a romantic pull in the previous 5 seasons.
    Suddenly, all the affectionate moments between the two were twisted conveniently to suit their argument, and ONLY after Season 6 was unleashed.
    I mean really, even after the two actors got married, no one saw anything romantic between the two on-screen. In fact everyone praised their professionalism in keeping everything sibling-like on "Dexter".. Now suddenly we're told by the team and the newly converted Debster shippers that the signs were always there? That's bull. Fans like me are accused of being close-minded. But this is not a moral issue, this is a bad story telling issue.

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    1. "Suddenly, all the affectionate moments between the two were twisted conveniently to suit their argument, and ONLY after Season 6 was unleashed."

      They aren't being "twisted". People are just showing examples from the show that have been there all along.

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    2. 4:31

      Right, I don't know why but that statement with the whole "twisted" argument is the final straw for me.

      Especially after Jennifer Carpenter sat down several times now and told us YES that she put those emotions into those scenes.

      If she did, what we saw she did, then the only people, who could, in fact, be TWISTING it, is the people who say it wasn't there.

      I am so fucking done with this argument - I could chew metal at the moment.

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    3. +100

      The only possible way they could possible retrospectively actorwank pretending that Deb had romantic feelings for Dexter all along would be the scene in season 2 when Deb asks Dexter whether he and Rita f*** loudly. Even that is stretching it beyond logic.

      I know JC has said that she believes Deb has always had an underlying feeling for Dexter, but she speaks of it as being an underlying suspicion of him that something is not right. If she wants to buy that that was there in her performance, I would believe that.

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    4. You think THAT'S the only scene that suggests Deb having romantic feelings for Dexter...LOL!

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  11. LayRay:

    Ready my comments above. Don't call solid subtext shoddy because an audience is too uneducated to understand basic Freudian or Jungian psychology, and that they don't get that almost all sociopaths and psychopaths engage in incestuous relationships OR fantasize about them.

    Many viewers saw the sexual tension between these two right from the first episode. From the first episode, the first scene between them, it was PATENTLY OBVIOUS, especially to those of us who read the fucking book. If you have a fucking brain, and you read fucking literature, and you know how these types of stories develop and you understand the genre, you always knew it was coming.

    The only reason the writers pushed it aside and kept it in subtext early, is that they did not want to overwhelm their viewers on a show where they already felt that people would have a hard time accepting a protagonist serial killer. Rita was a touchstone to get the audience to "accept" Dexter. They were building an audience. Now, because the show is aged, and Rita is dead, it is the appropriate time to explore ALL the themes FULLY.

    For the sake of art, and for the sake of the legacy of this show - it needs to play out.

    This is Showtime, a network that has subjected me as a viewer, to an 11 year old boy getting a handjob and a bearded lesbian getting knocked up by her gay boyfriend. It would be pretty freaking sad indeed if we got screwed out of THIS story because of a bunch of whining nitwits and pseudo moralists who have never picked up a real book in their life because they were too busy playing Xbox, had a hissy fit about it.

    And by the way, you don't need to "twist" anything when the writers see fit to write S1 scenes where Dexter is dreaming of being snuffed (the equivalent to SEX for Dexter) by his sister while she is wearing the hooker outfit that provoked him in his first scene with her in the pilot.

    Explain to me how we "twisted" that?

    You can't because you got jack. Your argument holds no weight at all because it's just knee-jerk bullshit run of the mill argument that you copied almost word for word from some other hack on IMDB, the place where worst kind of fans go to rip and tear and whine about shows they supposedly "love".

    One fan brought Deb's feelings up at the Paley center between seasons 4 and 5 - and when someone tried to make that fan feel stupid, Michael C. Hall intervened and said "It wasn't a stupid question at all". In season 3 on the Showtime boards an entire thread got deleted because there was a nasty argument over whether Deb was in love with Dexter or not... and a very very smart poster got trampled by a bunch of witless pricks and laughed at and told that she was crazy and that the writers would NEVER in a million years bring up the fact that Deb was in love with Dexter. I never saw her post about Dexter again, anywhere.

    Too bad she isn't still around to claim her due. Perhaps she isn't a fan of the show anymore because she felt the rest of the fans were a bunch of raging assholes...

    I was posting about this shit ON this very site early on in season 6 and on other sites early in season 5, and people were LAUGHING me into silence until it got close to happening, then they started copying my posts everywhere on the internet. I was basically drug back into the Showtime forums against my will because people would not stop copying what I wrote here and posting it there. And then when I tried to make my case there, I got arbitrarily flamed, called every name in the book, and then accused of being a Showtime insider because I knew how the end of the season was going to go down.

    Just because the majority of viewers have been witless braying sheep, who never saw it coming, does not mean that it wasn't being said. It's just that most people keep quiet when everyone behaves like an asshole to them for daring to actually THINK and look inside the characters and their motivations.

    Z

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    1. And PS

      I took entire mountains of shit from some really lousy fans for what I said about this over the years. It was such an obvious conjecture, and to me, most of the argument against her feelings at this point is just sour grapes. It's a bunch of thoughtless fans being TOO COWARDLY to own up to the fact that they were dead wrong and completely missed one of the most important memes of the show.

      If the writers and producers try to appease these thoughtless miscreants by saying that the feelings just "went away" it will be the most unjust thing every perpetrated upon the discerning and open minded members of a viewing audience. It would be nothing more than "pandering", and despicable beyond words.

      Z

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    2. @Z

      I've been with the show since it started and rewatched it multiple times and I don't think that I ever saw a relationship between Deb and Dexter coming before season 6. Maybe I am stupid for not seeing that, maybe I did play too much xbox, maybe I am a witless braying sheep or maybe I'm all of the above lol. Either way I do feel like an idiot after reading your post.

      Now that I know what is supposedly happening and I look back at the earlier seasons it get's a little more obvious of course and I feel even more like a sheep. With all this said I was never one of the morons who spew their shit on others who did catch up on all this before I did. I am completely in favor of the show going there, there's nothing I want more and nothing would piss me off more than having the story line dropped.

      PS

      I have the first book here with me just waiting for me to get in the mood. ;)

      The Witless Sheep

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    3. Sorry Patrik,

      I exploded like a hand grenade there, but seriously - if you had taken the amount of shit I did and then had someone do the "after the fact" on you. You'd be a bit cranky too. I just can't take it anymore. I want to get into one of those giant earth moving machines and run over small buildings.

      Z

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    4. Haha don't worry, I'd be pissed too. You should explode more often because that was great.

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  12. They hired Yvonne Strahovski as the new love interest for Dexter. It's plain obvious. Otherwise they would have cast a less attractive actress.
    The whole Dexter and Deb romance won't really happen but the whole idea of it now in Deb head is a plot point to let her accept Dexter as a terminator of killers.

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