When you’re the lead — or even one of the major characters — in a long-running serialized drama, before that final season starts, you really should sit down with the writers and have a conversation that begins like this: “This last season needs to be really good because I don’t want to spend the next five years defending this goddamn show while I’m trying to promote my other projects.” Either Michael C. Hall didn’t have that conversation, or the Dexter writers didn’t listen, because nine months after the show went off the air, he’s still being forced to defend his show while promoting other projects.
I get the sense that he’s tired of it.
The company line that Michael C. Hall used to toe — “that Dexter got an appropriate, dark send-off” — is beginning to unravel. In a recent interview with IGN, Hall even went so far as to suggest that the final season had its problems, which might have made the ending even harder to swallow for the audience.
Certainly, the shakiness of certain aspects of the eighth season maybe made that ending less palatable to people. I don’t think people were ready to be told that, because they were already feeling a sense of ambivalence for the show. But the idea that he imprisons himself in a prison of his own making I think is fitting [for the character].”
Ask him again in another nine months, and “the shakiness of certain aspects” might be “the awful season as a whole” and “because they were already feeling a sense of ambivalence for the show” may be “I was already feeling a sense of ambivalence for the show.”
In fact, Michael C. Hall sometimes wishes the character had just died.
“Sometimes I wish he’d offed himself, wish he’d died, wish Deb had shot him in that train compartment — of course, that would have made an eighth season difficult to do,” the actor reflected wryly.
And aren’t we starting to get the feeling that Hall would’ve been much happier if there were never an eighth season to defend in the first place?
And no, if you’re asking, Michael C. Hall has no immediate plans to reprise the role in a spin-off.
Hall, by the way, is promoting his film Cold in July, which opens this weekend, not that anyone asked.
Source: IGN
