Michael C. Hall

Michael C. Hall, born Michael Carlyle Hall on February 1, 1971, in Raleigh, North Carolina, is an American actor and musician whose career spans Broadway, television, and film. His mother, Janice Hall, worked as a mental health counselor at Lees-McRae College, and his father, William Carlyle Hall, was a systems engineer manager for IBM. Hall had one older sister who died in infancy before his birth. His father died of prostate cancer in 1982 at the age of 39, when Hall was eleven years old. Hall has spoken about the lasting impact of that loss, noting that his father's death came at a moment when he was just beginning to relate to him as a young person approaching puberty.

Hall's introduction to performance came early. He appeared in a production of What Love Is while in second grade at Ravenscroft School in Raleigh, and by fifth grade he had taken up singing, beginning with a boys' choir and later participating in high school musicals including The Sound of Music, Oklahoma!, and Fiddler on the Roof. He graduated from Ravenscroft School in 1989 and enrolled at Earlham College, a liberal arts institution in Richmond, Indiana, where he continued acting and appeared in productions including Cabaret. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Earlham in 1993. Hall subsequently pursued graduate training at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, completing his Master of Fine Arts in 1996.

Hall's professional career began in the theater. Before reaching Broadway, he accumulated substantial off-Broadway experience, appearing in Macbeth and Cymbeline at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Timon of Athens and Henry V at The Public Theater, The English Teachers at the Manhattan Class Company, and the play Corpus Christi at the Manhattan Theatre Club. He also performed the role of Paris Singer in a workshop production of a Stephen Sondheim musical then titled Wise Guys, which later went through versions titled Bounce and Road Show. During the summer of 1995, he participated in the Texas Shakespeare Festival, playing Lancelot in Camelot, Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing. In 1998, he performed the role of Posthumus Leonatus in a production of Cymbeline that ran from August 4 to 30. He also appeared in Skylight at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

Hall's Broadway career began in 1999 when director Sam Mendes cast him as the Emcee in the revival of Cabaret. He went on to appear on Broadway in Chicago, The Realistic Joneses, Skylight, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, with his Broadway work spanning from 1996 to 2014. In 2003, he toured as Billy Flynn in Chicago. In 2014, he returned to Broadway in The Realistic Joneses, playing the role of John Jones, and that same year received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance. He assumed the title role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch on October 16, 2014, performing the role until January 18, 2015, and returned to the production from February 17 to 21, 2015, to replace John Cameron Mitchell, who had sustained a knee injury.

On television, Hall became widely recognized for two long-running dramatic roles. Sam Mendes suggested him for the role of David Fisher in the HBO drama Six Feet Under, in which Hall played a closeted funeral home co-owner. His work in the first season earned him an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and an AFI Award nomination for Actor of the Year in 2002. He shared in Screen Actors Guild nominations for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series across all five seasons of the show's run, winning the award in 2003 and 2004. Hall subsequently starred in and co-produced the Showtime series Dexter, premiering October 1, 2006, in which he played Dexter Morgan, a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department who operates as a serial killer and vigilante. The series concluded its original run in 2013 after eight seasons. For his performance, Hall received five Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series between 2008 and 2012, won the Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a TV Drama at the 67th Golden Globe Awards in 2010, and won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series at the 16th Screen Actors Guild Awards that same year. He also won the 2007 Television Critics Association award for Individual Achievement in Drama at the 23rd TCA Awards. Hall reprised the role of Dexter Morgan in Dexter: New Blood and Dexter: Resurrection, and performed the internal monologue in Dexter: Original Sin.

Hall's stage work continued alongside his television career. At the end of 2015 and into 2016, he starred as Thomas Newton in the New York Theatre Workshop production of Lazarus, created by David Bowie and Enda Walsh, and later appeared in the London production from October 25, 2016, through January 22, 2017. In December 2015, he performed the song Lazarus, which appeared on Bowie's final album Blackstar, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Hall's film credits include the thriller Paycheck, the science fiction thriller Gamer, Cold in July — which premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and was directed by Jim Mickle based on a novel by Joe R. Lansdale — Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, Game Night, and In the Shadow of the Moon. He portrayed Abraham Lincoln's advisor Leonard Swett in the documentary film The Gettysburg Address, and played US President John F. Kennedy in season two, episode eight of the Netflix historical drama The Crown, alongside Jodi Balfour as Jackie Kennedy. In 2018, he starred as Tom Delaney in the eight-part Netflix crime drama Safe. Hall also appeared in the off-Broadway production of Thom Pain, playing the title character.