“I’m excited as much as anybody else to see what’s on the horizon, though something that could go five more years is a little daunting at this point,” Hall told reporters in Beverly Hills recently. “I would like to mix it up a little more, commit to characters and have a sense of when it’s going to end, and having that ending three or four months later, not six or seven years.”
While Dexter has been a great boon to his career, Hall has reason to be concerned about typecasting. Will he ever be able to shake the persona of the blood-splatter expert/serial killer?
Hall’s been here before. When he finished HBO’s Six Feet Under, in which he played a funeral director, he wondered if anyone could imagine him not surrounded by dead bodies.
“Hmm,” he smiled. “Well, they are still imagining me surrounded by dead bodies. But, I recognize at the same time that it’s a title role in a show that has been on for eight seasons and I’m not going to try to run away from that or deny it.” Read the rest, after the jump...
Through the seasons, Hall has won a Golden Globe, married and divorced co-star Jennifer Carpenter, and defeated cancer after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2009. But for him, the hardest part was putting on Dexter’s kill suit.
“It’s like, you know George Bush, that ‘Mission Accomplished’ suit that he wore?” asked Hall about the one-piece coverall his character wears when indulging his peculiar habit. “Underneath, it’s like that. And after, there is that multiple gloves thing… It’s a real process.”
As for his favorites episodes, there are too many to count. “The first episode of the seventh season is in my Top 5, because it has been so long coming, this revelation,” he said about Dexter’s sister, Deb (Carpenter), finally learning he’s a serial killer.
“I think we are seeing Dexter in a landscape now where he is perhaps being punished by awareness of his behavior affecting more than just him; obviously his victims but also people who are really close to him,” he continued.
Hall went on to list an episode from the first season in which Dexter has a grisly flashback. “I got to pass out in a pool of blood, that was fun,” he recalled. “It wasn’t real blood. It wouldn’t have been fun if it was real blood.”
After eight seasons, Hall is quick to acknowledge the show has had an indelible imprint on him. “It has changed me,” he smiled. “I think it makes me really be aware that I don’t thankfully struggle with a compulsion to kill people. At least, not perpetually.”