It has been seven years in the making, but Deb finally knows Dexter’s secret. How did you guys tackle that? It’s such a delicate thing.
Well, in the books - I think at the end of the first book - Deb finds out. Then in the books they are working together - well, not really working together, but she knows and she is fine with it. Dexter does what he does, and she does what she does. So we always knew that this was going to happen. We came close to it in season five, with Lumen... but she didn’t quite.
Yes. I always felt like Deb didn’t put it together because she didn’t want to put it together.
Yes, that’s definitely a strong thread in Deb’s life, throughout season seven. Even now, we are finding out things that Deb didn’t want to think about. It’s like people who come to faith, they say that they only know as much as they can handle at that point - if they knew what was required of them, they might not go for it. Deb was definitely the same way. Even in the first episode, it took her awhile to figure out that this wasn’t just Dexter losing his mind for a few minutes, or even killing someone in cold blood - this was a lifestyle choice.
I haven’t read the books, but from what I understand, you guys stray from the books quite a bit.
Yes, significantly. We followed the first book - we did have to add a lot of twists and turns - but after book one, we parted ways. At the end of book one, Laguerta gets killed by the Ice Truck Killer... everything changes. At the end of book two, Doakes finds out who Dexter is and this bad killer kidnaps Doakes and cuts out his tongue and hands and feet, so even though he knows who Dexter is, he can’t tell on him. We went a different with Doakes. I don’t think any of us [writers] have even read any of the books past book three. In book three, Dexter finds out he is possessed by a demon, which makes it an entirely different idea. I think it’s cool that there are two different versions of Dexter out there in the world, and both are doing very well. And now he is in a comic book from Marvel, based off the Jeff Lindsay version of Dexter. So he won’t even look like Michael C. Hall! Read the whole interview, here.