14 DAY TRIAL // Season 5 of the much-hyped and critically acclaimed Showtime killer series “Dexter” premieres this month and, in honor of this highly anticipated return to the small screen of the entire cast (but of Dexter in particular), the New York Times has a brilliant piece with Michael C. Hall.
As fans must know, the actor announced he’d been diagnosed with cancer at the beginning of the year but, he reveals now for the NY Times, he actually knew about it while they were still shooting for season 4.
He didn’t want to let the others know, though, because he wanted to fight his battle alone, without being forced to “ruin” the experience of the show for others involved in the making of it.
Not even his wife, Jennifer Carpenter, who plays his sister on the show, knew about the diagnosis until production on season 4 wrapped, he tells the publication. When she found out, she couldn’t stop crying for days.
For those thinking there may be some parallelism between his onscreen, death-obsessed characters and his personal life, Hall says that’s not true.
However, when he found out he had cancer, the parallelism struck closer to home, in his father’s death of prostate cancer at the age of 39. Hall has just turned 39.
“I think I’ve been preoccupied since I was 11, and my father died, with the idea of the age 39: Would I live that long? What would that be like?” the actor says.
“To discover that I had the Hodgkin’s was alarming, but at the same time I felt kind of bemused, like: Wow. Huh. How interesting,” he adds.
Now cancer-free and with a full head of hair, Michael says he actually felt invigorated after he was done with chemotherapy: bigger, better and luckier than ever.
Right now, he’s happy to return in front of the camera as the forensics experts Dexter Morgan, who works by night as a serial killer hunting other killers who escape the long arm of the law, which is actually shorter than we may believe.
Dexter knows a lot about repressing emotion. Dexter also knows a lot about hiding himself from others – just like Michael C. Hall himself, some may say, a comparison the actor doesn’t shun altogether.
He’s glad he’s back to work, especially since he knows fans have been waiting for the new season of the show literally on the edge of their seat.
“Obviously the fourth season recalibrated everything. Everything we’d seen him build up is now gone. It was sad to see Julie Benz go and leave the ‘Dexter’ family, but from an acting standpoint, creatively, it’s really been invigorating to have him so completely decimated,” Hall says.
“I think as far as the emergence of the adversary, the big bad if you will, that form may have been perfected last season. I think there was a desire to move beyond, to break that mold,” he adds.
He won’t say more of what fans are to expect with the brand new episodes, but he’ll say this much: Julia Stiles’ character is not Dexter’s adversary. She’s not his friend, either, which only makes this all the more interesting.
For the full interview with Michael C. Hall for the New York Times, please refer here.