It’s a funny thing sometimes, how the public’s perception of someone can be so at odds with how they see themselves. To much of the public, Michael C. Hall is a Golden Globe-winning television actor, and a brilliant one best known for two iconic roles in two groundbreaking series—as David Fisher in Six Feet Under and as the title character in Dexter. But Hall is also a classically trained actor, renowned for his interpretations of Shakespeare, hand-picked by Sondheim to star in the workshop version of one of his new plays, becoming the toast of Broadway with his lead performance in Sam Menges’ legendary revival of Cabaret.
It’s a dichotomy Hall is aware of, but he’s philosophical about it: “I think a lot of the specific things that confront you, if you have some sort of presence in the public’s consciousness through work that you’ve done, encourage you to check yourself in the same way that you’d encourage yourself to do it otherwise. We all struggle not to project onto other people an idea of who we are, and to act either in accordance with, or in a way that is resistant to, that imagined perception. I don’t know. I’m glad that people associate me with stuff that I’m proud to have done. While maybe they don’t have a sense of who I am as a person more broadly, or of what I’ve done as an actor beyond those two roles, I’m just glad they don’t associate me primarily with something that I see as way down on my own list of accomplishments. I think I’ve been lucky that some of the things that have been the most artistically viable for me have also been the most commercially viable things I’ve done. But I challenge myself generally not to concern myself too much with what other people are thinking of me; that’s always an inherent preoccupation, admittedly. But when it comes to people’s perceptions of me as an actor, if someone comes up to me and says they’re a fan of Dexter, I don’t feel compelled to recite a soliloquy or anything.”
Despite his extensive training and Broadway and other stage experience, Hall was basically a neophyte in the TV world when he landed the role of David Fisher in Six Feet Under, and the five seasons that followed turned out to be an extended masterclass for him. The two actors who played David’s parents particularly informed his own work. “I certainly was perpetually in awe of and inspired by Frances Conroy,” he remembers, “and her sort of egoless-ness. Her willingness to put herself in very messy places, and her ability to completely give over and commit to those places, without being in any way hampered by ego constraints. It just made her performance that much more beautiful. I think there was an ease with which Richard Jenkins acted. And by no means do I mean laziness or anything like that. But there’s just such an ease with which he is able to inhabit a character in a scene. That was an inspiration as well. Those are two touchstones. But I was inspired every day by all those people.”
In a play, or in a film for that matter, an actor knows the whole story ahead of time, can find his character’s arc and pace his performance accordingly. Hall had to learn to approach his television characters without all that knowledge. “It’s a different assignment in that way,” he muses. “You’re making an open-ended commitment to a character, and you don’t know exactly where the character’s headed, nor do you know exactly how long you’ll be doing it. The Dexter who I encountered and tried to crack open in the pilot is a far cry from the Dexter that exists in the final season. So I don’t know; it’s always a leap of faith when you sign on to something and commit to the way it’s being told, but I think the leap is all the more significant when you have a sense of the beginning, and a vague sense of the middle, but no idea of what the end might be. That is a different proposition.”
In the current New Golden Age of television, where the field of possibilities is so much wider, that challenge is even more difficult. That doesn’t intimidate Hall; it thrills him. “I think there was a time,” he says, “where when you did a television show, you had a sense of what is was going to be from the beginning, because they didn’t evolve as much, and they weren’t as adventurous in the storytelling as they are now. So that’s part of what makes it that much more of a leap of faith, but also that much more exciting for an actor. And that’s part of why so many great actors are gravitating towards what’s being done on television right now. It’s a little more like life in that way. Life is what happens when you’re making other plans, and maybe television is the same way.”
To make the challenge even more pronounced in the case of Dexter, Hall’s character is not only the protagonist, but really the brain center of the entire show.
“Six Feet Under was much more of a true ensemble piece,” he says. “Dexter is more subjectively told; you’re seeing things from his perspective and hearing his private thoughts. I think, in a way, for Dexter, who is as much an idea as he is a real person, for him to be surrounded by characters who aren’t as fully dimensional as he is, is part of the conceit of the show. Along with the core cast of people, acting with Jimmy Smits and John Lithgow and Julia Stiles and Charlotte Rampling and the list goes on… I certainly had some great guest players to work with. But it’s apples and oranges, I think.”
In the last decade or so, many a critically acclaimed television series has gone out with a finale that fizzled, leaving critics and fans unsatisfied. Dexter avoided that pitfall, and that makes Hall proud. “I feel proud about the story as a whole,” he says, “and I feel good about the way it ended. I think there’s this general trend with television finales, and it seems to have reached this sort of critical mass, that finales are more and more galvanizing or criticized or just sort of an invitation for people to take issue. And yeah that’s cool, but today’s newspapers wrap tomorrow’s fishes. I think we are left to wonder. But I don’t get the impression at the end of the show that he has in any way been cleansed or cured.”
As different as they are, there are still a few similarities between the fictional character Dexter and the real-life David Kammerer, who Hall plays in this month’s film Kill Your Darlings. Kammerer was a rather tragic figure in the early days of the Beat movement, part villain and part sacrificial lamb. “Both guys have a compulsion that they are saddled with,” Hall explains. “Dexter is unable to let go of his compulsion to kill people. David Kammerer is unable to let go of his compulsion to have his feelings for Lucien [Carr] reciprocated—and in a way, that is a more desperate situation.”
It’s a project that immediately appealed to Hall when he was approached to play the part. “I was aware of this story,” he says, “and I had gone through my period of fascination with the Beats. I was excited that it was being told, and especially told as well as it was in John [Krokidas] and Austin [Bunn]’s script. I was excited more specifically about the opportunity to humanize this guy who was in many ways a footnote in accounts of the formative years of the Beat Generation, and was if anything characterized as a bit of a two-dimensional villain, a stalker. I liked that the movie seemed to aspire to round him out a bit.”
Playing a real person always brings its own challenges, but there are some advantages to the job as well, says Hall: “It’s fun to have some real things to hold onto. It makes it, to some degree, a different exercise to play a real person. And certainly, I think whether it’s purely fictional or based on a real person, judgment must be withheld—or not exist on the first place. And in the case of David Candler, I didn’t think of him as a stalker. I thought of him as someone who was in love with the wrong person and couldn’t let it go. I think just tolerating being in a place of such unfulfilled passion—that’s a challenging place to live, and to tolerate.”