Michael C. Hall and the serial killer nobody will let him bury

Michael C. Hall

Photo: Keith McDuffee / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 1, 1971 Raleigh, North Carolina
Occupation	Actor and singer
Known for	Game Night, Kill Your Darlings, The Report
Awards	Golden Globe · SAG Award · 2 SAG Award (shared)

Michael C. Hall has buried Dexter Morgan twice. The first time, the blood-spatter analyst who killed other killers faked his own death and vanished into a logging town, an ending so widely mocked that it became shorthand for how not to finish a television series. The second time, his own son shot him in the snow. Neither grave held. The character is back again, older, relocated to New York and facing two new murderers, and Hall is no longer only the man playing him: he also produces the show. The question his career keeps asking is less whether he can leave Dexter than why he keeps coming back.

The answer is not that he has nothing else. Hall has spent the years between revivals singing David Bowie on a Manhattan stage, fronting a glam-rock musical on Broadway and building a band with two musicians he met in its pit. Television made him famous twice, and both times it was as a man hiding who he was.

Hall grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he was born on February 1, 1971. His mother, Janice, was a mental health counselor; his father, William Carlyle Hall, an IBM systems engineer, died of prostate cancer at 39, when his son was eleven. He studied at Earlham College, a small Quaker school in Indiana, graduating in 1993, and earned an MFA in acting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1996.

The stage came first. In 1999 he made his Broadway debut as the Emcee in Sam Mendes‘s revival of Cabaret, a part that asks an actor to be seductive and menacing in the same breath, and later toured as the lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago. Within two years he was on HBO.

In Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under, which ran from 2001 to 2005, Hall played David Fisher, the eldest son of a family of Los Angeles undertakers: a closeted church deacon who wanted, above everything, to be respectable. It was one of the first long portraits of a gay man on American television allowed to be dull, devout, furious and loved, and Hall played the repression without winking at it. The cast won the Screen Actors Guild ensemble award in 2003 and again in 2004, and Hall earned his first Emmy nomination.

Then came Dexter. Showtime’s adaptation of Jeff Lindsay’s novels ran from 2006 to 2013 and turned on a premise that should not have worked: a Miami police forensics expert who murders other murderers under a code taught to him by his adoptive father. Hall’s narration, dry and faintly amused, did most of the persuading. In January 2010, days after disclosing that he was being treated for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he won the Golden Globe for best actor in a television drama and the Screen Actors Guild award for male actor in a drama series, accepting in a knit cap while still in treatment. He was in remission by April. Across his television work he collected six Emmy nominations and never won. During the show’s run he married Jennifer Carpenter, who played Dexter’s sister Debra; they divorced in 2011.

The case against the franchise is easy to make, and Hall has helped make it possible. The 2013 finale, with Dexter alone and bearded in Oregon, was received as a betrayal of everything the show had built. Dexter: New Blood arrived in 2021 as a correction and ended by killing him, a full stop that looked deliberate. Then the full stop became a comma. Paramount+ needed a franchise, the prequel Dexter: Original Sin brought Hall back as the inner voice of his younger self, and Dexter: Resurrection undid the death outright. Each return earns attention his riskier work never gets. More people will watch one episode of a Dexter revival than ever saw him as David Kammerer, the obsessive older man in Kill Your Darlings, or as the small-town picture framer who shoots an intruder in Jim Mickle’s Cold in July.

That riskier work is where his range shows. On Broadway he took over the title role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch in 2014. In December 2015 he opened Off-Broadway in Lazarus, the musical David Bowie wrote with Enda Walsh as a sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth, playing the stranded alien Thomas Newton; Bowie died a few weeks later, and the production carried his last songs to London in 2016. On screen he played John F. Kennedy in an episode of The Crown, a suburban widower in Harlan Coben‘s Netflix thriller Safe and a criminal known as the Bulgarian in the comedy Game Night. With keyboardist Matt Katz-Bohen and drummer Peter Yanowitz, both from the Hedwig band, he formed Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, since shortened to Princess Goes, which released Thanks for Coming in 2021 and Come of Age in 2023.

Dexter: Resurrection premiered on Paramount+ in July 2025, with Hall as star and executive producer, and the second season begins streaming on October 30, 2026, twenty years after the original series first aired. Showrunner Clyde Phillips brings back Uma Thurman and Jack Alcott, as Dexter’s son Harrison, and adds Brian Cox as the New York Ripper, a serial killer who once terrorized the city, and Dan Stevens as the Five Borough Killer. The trailer sells it as a midlife crisis with a body count.

The same week, Princess Goes is scheduled to release its third album, titled 3, produced by Brandon Bost and previewed by the singles “French Kiss” and “Heart 2 Heart”. On film, Hall joined Noomi Rapace and Teo Yoo in Stratagem, a spy thriller directed by Michael Idov and set at a cybersecurity summit in the Swiss Alps, his first major screen role outside Dexter since John and the Hole. He has been married since 2016 to the writer Morgan Macgregor.

None of that settles the question the revivals raise. It sharpens it. Hall has shown, on stage and in a band, that he does not need Dexter Morgan to work, which means every return is a choice, and the second season of Resurrection is the next one.