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| Showtime |
Michael C. Hall, Julia Jones, Jennifer Carpenter, Showrunner Clyde Phillips, executive producer and writer Scott Reynolds, and director Marcos Siega discussed the return of American's favorite serial killer on Tuesday, during the virtual summer Television Critics Association press tour.
We gathered (almost) everything they said, below!
ICYMI: Click here to read the... 'spoilery' bits of the press tour!
1. “We don’t spend a great deal of time doing anything like a flashback to where Dexter has been,” Hall says. They’re picking up with him in Iron Lake, where he’s “cobbling together a semblance of a normal life.”
2. There are some touchstones to the look of the show, “but we really wanted to set it apart” with a new visual tone, Marcos Siega says.
3. Phillips says this isn’t a ninth season of the show, rather it’s acknowledging that time has passed and a new take on the show.
4. “There had been different instances where we considered revisiting the show,” Hall says, but with this revival take, they opted to keep Dexter outside of a major city, etc. Hall notes Dexter has come a long way in the time that has passed. But it “felt right” to be in a different place from the Miami location.
5. Adds Clyde Phillips, “He will find himself struggling with the urge, struggling with the Dark Passenger…and finally give into that struggle.”
6. “I think the way the series ended has a great deal to do with why we’re revisiting the show and the character,” Hall says. “I think a lot of what was mystifying and not satisfying to people is a lot of what creates [the desire to revisit it]…the show did not end in a way that was definitive for people or gave anyone a sense of closure. We didn’t hear from Dexter, he didn’t say anything to us….it left audiences in a state of suspended animation.”
7. Dexter has an unexpected friend (Harrison) when the show kicks off that helps him handle his urges to kill. “It’s like the methadone” to killing, Hall notes.
8. Julia Jones who plays Angela Bishop, is watching Dexter for the first time now. She notes Dexter has a lot more humanity now than he did in the original run of the drama.
9. Phillips says he and Hall have discussed the show returning for years, but “the timing was never right for Michael.”
10. Hall says he’s thought of the character over the years. He notes his mother wanted him to be in a monastery. “I think she wanted him to meditate for ten hours,” he jokes.
11. “She’s definitely more than Dexter’s girlfriend,” Julia Jones says. “She’s passionate, she’s compassionate, she’s strong-willed and flawed.”
12. Phillips about a potential spinoff: “We’re not going there”.
13. “We took the time to make sure the past decade was well represented,” Phillips says. The show is a whole new world.
14. But Phillips and Hall skirted questions regarding the future of the franchise. When asked if there would be a chance for Dexter to live on in a spinoff focused on Rita and Dexter's grown-up son, Harrison, who returns in the revival or if Hall would be interested in continuing to play the character past these initial 10 episodes, they were adamant that they have not thought that far ahead. Their cagey responses may provide insight into what may or may not happen in the final episode of New Blood that may affect a possible continuation of the world.
15. “We’re not going to get into the ending of the show,” Phillips says, declining to discuss whether the show could return.
16. Added Hall: "For me to answer that question definitively in any way would maybe give away or potentially imply information that we don't want to give away or imply, so I'll refrain from answering too definitively. I certainly do hope that watching the show is a satisfying experience for people who watched it originally and are curious about what happens to him. I hope it does provide some definitive answers that aren't primarily mystifying to people."
17. Phillips also notes that though he had an idea of how the show would end back in the day, but it doesn’t mean Showtime would have allowed for it to happen.
18. Hall didn’t go back and rewatch any of the original series to prep. He admits it was “somewhat daunting” to deal with embodying someone who had essentially kept on existing after he said goodbye to the character. They shot 119 days, 52 locations, and he didn’t have as much time to assess what was going on. “He was still there,” Hall notes, because he spent a lot of time “with and as him.”
19. Jennifer Carpenter sees this version of Debra that she is playing as an “echo or and inconvenient truth for Dexter.” That new take was what attracted her to come back to the show.
20. “I didn’t really feel like I wanted to go back and fix a broken score,” Carpenter said. “I feel like Deb had a different ending than the show. So, I decided that my work was to go to the bottom of the ocean and collect her and see if she wanted to be a witness to watch an unmedicated, decoded, unpunished, unchecked serial killer experience himself.”
21. “Deb had a different ending than the show had,” Carpenter says. “I wanted to massage Deb’s scar tissue…it was cosmically profound going back.”
22. "I don't think of her as a ghost but more of a link or an echo or an inconvenient truth for Dexter, so that's all that attracted me to come back and haunt and punish and caretake and provoke and love Dexter. It kind of felt like this show happened on two campuses," Carpenter elaborated. "There was the main entree of the show and there's like this community college where Deb lives. I just needed to know where Dexter was emotionally. That's where I put all of my concentration."
23. The new main title sequence won’t be as cheeky as the OG, Phillips says. “Viewers should expect the title sequence—if there even is one—will be very different than what it was before.”
24. Hall says there are storytelling possibilities in play this go-round that made a return appealing. He also wanted to return because it allowed them to “get the band back together. “I remember that first season it felt like we were in on a secret, and it felt like a secret worth sharing,”
25. Carpenter says her car broke down on the way home from the audition and she’s grateful it was that versus on the way there. “This role has been one of the great privileges of my life.”
26. Hall was thankful they filmed away from home, so he could separate the worlds. “To spend this much intense time preoccupied with the imagined life and psychology of a character that is otherwise words on a page…there has to be some line blurring that happens.”
27. Carpenter suggested that she's playing "Dexter's version of Deb" and not the same character as before.