Michael C. Hall is officially done with Dexter so he’s headed back to the stage in the Broadway play, The Realistic Joneses, at the Lyceum Theatre. He made his debut on the Great White Way in 1999 as the Emcee in Cabaret, so this marks a return to his theater roots.
He explained what his return means to him. Hall said, “I don’t think I’ve gone longer in my life without being on stage. It had just been difficult to find something that really worked with the hiatus periods [on Dexter]. Once it ended, it felt like it would be a cleansing.”
The 43-year-old actor said, “I got invited at noon to do a work session at 6 p.m. that lasted 45 minutes. I did that and went and got a sandwich at a deli. I was standing under the marquee at Studio 54 and the casting director Jim Carnahan came out and said ‘You got it.’ I hadn’t seen it yet, so I went that night, an hour later, and thought, ‘Holy moly.'”
In his latest show, Hall plays John Jones, an odd duck who moves to a remote area of the mountains with his wife. The couple meet up with their next-door neighbors who also happen to have the same last name. The storyline delves into the cosmic mysteries of life.
The process of doing a new show was a bit daunting for Hall. He shared what that process was like.
“We rehearsed for 3½ weeks and then had 3½ weeks of previews. That’s not a whole lot of time, so a lot of the physical life and discovering the connective tissue of that evolved over the course of early previews. We really did approach it like we were rehearsing on stage,” he said. “There were changes in terms of what was happening physically, there were changes in the script, there were cuts, there were additions. We even had script pages backstage where we would go and remind ourselves of what had changed and what was new in between scenes.”
Now that he’s back onstage and moving away from the role of Dexter, Hall is making sure he’s not typecast in the future.
“I certainly think if somebody is inspired to think of me for something, it probably has to do with their having seen me do Dexter. But as far as everything coming across my desk being about serial killers or murder, maybe I get a higher percentage of that than the average, but so much of what’s out there now is about that kind of stuff anyway,” he said.
Via WSJ.com
