It was never part of any mission statement I had,” insists Michael C Hall, “playing characters who are, in one way or another, surrounded by dead bodies.” He smiles, shrewdly. “But it’s just sort of how it went down.” It’s true – at this point, the 54-year-old American actor has spent roughly two and a half decades rubbing shoulders with corpses, first as David Fisher, the uptight, gay mortician in HBO’s coruscatingly morbid TV gem Six Feet Under, and then, in an on-and-off 20-year run, as Miami-based serial killer Dexter Morgan, who supplied many of the cadavers himself.
Hall is speaking to me from his home in North Carolina, days before the premiere of Dexter: Resurrection, a new series reviving his killer-with-a-code. Even condensed to the size of a laptop screen, his face is a great, telegenic one. Arching, mischievous eyebrows complicate the effect of his hard-angled leading-man jawline: throw in a smirk and some mood lighting, and the whole thing becomes quite benignly devilish. It’s the face of a man born to play everyone’s favourite murderer.
