Michael C. Hall, seen here as Dexter Morgan in Dexter: Resurrection, has a knack for uncanny and inscrutable characters.Zach Dilgard/Paramount+ /SHOwtime/Supplied
Dexter Morgan is being resurrected on Paramount+ this Friday – and so are the character’s internal monologues.
As soon the body of television’s presumed dead serial-killer-killing serial killer comes back to life through a defibrillator shock in the premiere episode of Dexter: Resurrection, that familiar voiceover kicks back in too: “Ah, a beating heart. I’ll take it.”
Michael C. Hall, the 54-year-old American actor with a knack for uncanny and inscrutable characters, has been playing pop-culture’s most resilient psychopath on screen in various incarnations of the show since 2006 – and voiced his internal monologue in all of them, including last winter’s prequel series, Dexter: Original Sin, in which Patrick Gibson played a younger version.
In Dexter: Resurrection, Hall is back to his usual unusual acting routine – speaking Dexter’s diegetic dialogue in front of a camera, and then heading to a recording room to voice his unvoiced thoughts, which are often filled with mordant humour and off-kilter philosophical insight.
In advance, Hall talked to The Globe and Mail about that complicated process and redeeming the voiceover as a narrative device – at least in dark TV dramedies.
What do you think it is that keeps bringing viewers back to this character?
Dexter: Resurrection is streaming on Paramount+ this Friday.Zach Dilgard/Paramount+/SHOWTIME
Obviously watching Dexter take out the bad guys is a vicarious thrill for people. Watching him get out of self-imposed jams in a way that’s remarkable is fun for people. The character is both uniquely capable on the one hand and very limited in his capacity on the other hand – and people enjoy spending time with a character who’s both of those things at once.
They enjoy spending time with a character who’s afflicted with a substantial and formidable shadow side and takes unique responsibility for it. A fundamental part of people’s experience of the show has to do with the voiceover element, with the fact that they’re looking at this guy who’s fundamentally isolated from the world and lonely, and they are in on his experience of the world in a way that is more intimate than any relationship he has with people who populate the world of the show. People, I think, cherish that sense of connection.
Voiceover once upon a time was such a derided element of television storytelling or film storytelling, people would say it was sort of –
A crutch.
A crutch, exactly. But it’s creatively employed in Dexter and we’ve seen his internal monologue since influence other shows such as Netflix’s You and Apple TV+’s Murderbot. I was curious about your acting process: Do you know what you’re going to be saying all the time in your head?
More or less. There are modifications that happen after we shoot episodes for storytelling reasons or little tweaks. But‚ for the most part, I have a sense of what the voiceover is when I’m playing the scenes. In that case, I try to know that thought and think that thought. Sometimes the thought is a counterpoint to the action of the scene and so I don’t preoccupy myself with that counterpoint, or at least playing it, because you’re going to hear it. But if nothing else, I need to know how long it lasts so that I can take the requisite pause so that we can fit it in.
I have to sometimes apologize to my fellow actors for the seemingly inorganic pauses that I’m going to take in the midst of scenes – or pauses that they have to take – so that it can be slid in.
Do you sound it out in your head, or do you have a beat count that you do?
Sometimes I say it to myself. Sometimes there’s a sort of essential nature of the thought that I focus on more rather than trying to think word by word every word of the voiceover, because I think thought doesn’t really work that way all the time. And sometimes it’s completely technical – and I need to know how long it lasts so I just make sure I count long enough leave space for it.
Acting is often either mining the subtext or saying the thing that your character is feeling. You get to do two performances for every scene, I guess.
Some of my favourite voiceover moments are those where Dexter is revealing something that’s antithetical to what he’s simulated to the other characters who populate the scene. I record a temporary version of them for the editors, so as they’re assembling scenes, they have it. Then I rerecord it all to picture when we’re doing the final sort of ADR sound sessions – that’s a chance to find ways in which a delivery of a voiceover line could maybe be modified given how the scene is playing. It’s another layer of performance that is unique to this acting assignment for sure.
It’s sounds like you take a lot of ownership over it. So when you’re recording the final version of the voiceover, you’re looking at yourself on screen, you’re looking at the actual shot.
Yeah, I’m looking at the actual shot and maybe modifying the delivery with that in mind and in sight. Sometimes it’s technical: There are breaks in thought that if you do it to picture can coincide with edit points or looks that just make it feel more nuanced and alive.
Breaking Bad’s creator Vince Gilligan recently was talking about how he wanted to create more inspiring characters rather than antiheroes going forward. Dexter was a real part of that original burst of TV antiheroes like Walter White and Tony Soprano. What are your own thoughts on the genre and what that puts out into the world – and have they changed at all?
I don’t really preoccupy myself with trends like that. With Dexter, I feel entrusted with being a guardian of my sense of the truth of that character and that idea. I think a part of what’s unique about Dexter is that, in spite of what he’s up to, there is something about him that does inspire something that’s not just blood-lusty in the audience. In spite of what Dexter maybe believes about himself and his capacity, there’s something fundamentally human about him.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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