One of the best highlights of the latest season of Dexter is due in large part to actor Colin Hanks. The thirty-four year old played a crucial role as one of the biggest threats to Dexter, a role that seems to have fallen into the talented actor’s lap out of no where.
Talking about his role with Vulture, Hanks says that the opportunity came untraditionally for him. “It came through quasi-normal channels. The only thing that was sort of unusual was I got a phone call saying, Hey, they want you; they wanna offer you this role, which doesn’t happen very often. And so I had a phone conversation with [producers] Scott Buck and Sara Colleton. They told me a little bit about the character and said, I hope you’d consider doing it. And the whole time, I’m sitting there like, I don’t really have to consider. So normal channels, but different than any other sort of job that I’ve ever done before.”
Hanks says he wasn’t aware of the full extent of his character and his path, or that Professor Gellar was actually dead. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know about the big reveal,” adding that because he wasn’t aware he acted as if Gellar was real. “They didn’t tell me, so I just played him as if he were a real person. Which is great.” Acting in scenes with a toddler was also a different challenge for the Colin. “It was incredibly hard.” If Hanks was privy to the secret plot he does admit that things could have changed his approach. “I’m sure I would have in some way, so it was a luxury to just not worry about that. There’s always this sort of thing like – Oh, I wish I know what’s gonna happen so I can do my actor stuff and prepare and properly tell the story. But on the first day of shooting that we did, I remembered Eddie [James Olmos] having a conversation with [director] John Dahl. And Eddie knew about the reveal; John did not. And John said, “Look, it’s the great thing about life, you never know what’s gonna happen, so that makes for more realistic storytelling.”
