Michael C Hall on the return of Dexter: ‘The ending was frustrating – we’re making things right’

In late April, Michael C Hall took a break from reanimating TV’s greatest serial killer and channeling David Bowie to appear on Ken Bruce’s Radio 2 show to talk through the Tracks of My Years.

The second song chosen by the American actor – currently shooting the comeback season of Dexter, which wrapped its eight-series run in 2013 – was Queen’s nominatively accurate 1974 banger Stone Cold Crazy. It’s a selection we might expect from a song-and-dance man who’s starred in the Broadway shows Cabaret and Chicago, reincarnated The Man Who Fell to Earth in the cosmic stage musical Lazarus, and who now, away from the day-job, fronts an art-rock synthpop band called (deep breath) Princess Goes To The Butterfly Museum.

But the first track that Hall presented to radio's cheery popmaster was Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head from the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid soundtrack and sung by the late B.J. Thomas. What was it about that Bacharach and David song that spoke to him?

“Well, that was a one of the songs that my mother used to sing to me,” begins Hall as he talks over Zoom from his rented apartment in northern Massachusetts, his base for most of this year as he films Dexter’s comeback. “And some of the songs that she sang to me were original compositions of hers, and some turned out to be songs that I would later discover pre-existed her – and that was one of them.

“So the first time I heard that song on AM radio, I thought: ‘How did this person know? They're covering my mother's song!’” he smiles.

Sharing the Zoom screen are his two bandmates and co-songwriters, keyboard player Matt Katz-Bohen and drummer Peter Yanowitz, speaking from their New York studios in, respectively, Brooklyn and Manhattan. While they chuckle appreciatively at this reminiscence, Hall remains an engaging but low-key, languorous Zoomer. It's a demeanour entirely at odds with his stage presence and with the theatricality and, at times, pummelling electronic rock of PGTBM's debut album, Thanks For Coming.

That was my first question for the 50-year-old star of beloved HBO series Six Feet Under, familiar more recently from The Crown, in which he played John F. Kennedy, and from his role as an English doctor opposite Amanda Abbington in Netflix’s British-set 2018 Harlan Coben adaptation Safe. My second: with his busy day-job and, frankly, at his age, why join a band? Here, Hall laughs.

“I don't know! It just sort of revealed itself. I don't feel like I joined a band so much as was in the room when the three of us discovered that a band had joined us or something. It wasn't really a plan. It just [happened]. But, I mean, why not?”

The trio’s meeting point was the 2014-2015 Broadway production of rock musical Hewdig and the Angry Inch. Hall had the lead role, and Katz-Bohen and Yanowitz played in the character’s band, as they had when other actors had played the part.

“There was a great chemistry just straight away as friends,” recalls Yanowitz, a cheerful 53-year-old who looks every inch the career drummer. “And when we got on stage, that continued. There was just a good vibe on that show backstage, especially when Michael was doing the show. It was a lot of fun and that spilled over to hanging out after the show, then driving back downtown together and listening to a lot of music, having a Scotch and hanging out.”

But for the two musicians, time-served players in multiple other non-theatrical projects – Katz-Bohen has played with Blondie since 2008 and still does; Yanowitz was a founder member of Jakob Dylan’s band The Wallflowers – there was also an urge to make their own music.

“We were playing songs written by other people every night,” says Katz-Bohen, a chilled long-hair who might be more Keanu Reeves than Keanu Reeves is. “And they're great songs and it's an amazing show that we respected so much. But we were like: we have to get our own musical creativity out.”

Still, having come up with some songs, Hall wasn’t the obvious choice to front them. They knew he could sing on a theatrical stage, but he’d never been in a band and, as far as they knew, didn’t write lyrics. As he puts it, “most of my experiences singing were actually singing in choirs” he says of a youthful extra-curricular passion that included a 10-week concert tour of Austria. “When I was in college I was in a little chamber choir that did Palestrina masses,” he says of the 16th century Italian Renaissance composer. “So I think a lot of my sense of musicality actually comes from that choral singing stuff.”

Not, then, the obvious background for the frontman in a synth-based power-trio. “Yeah, I think I pitched myself,” nods Hall. “I went to dinner with Peter one night and we wound up back in the studio where he is now – the studio where we recorded pretty much everything that you hear on the record. He played me a couple of the instrumental tracks that he and Matt had put together. And I just thought they sounded amazing and casually said: ‘If you ever want somebody to sing on these, let me know.’ I didn't say it with any aspiration or that we would become a band. It was more I thought it would be fun.”

But having come up with words for “a couple” of those tracks, then recorded rough vocals, “there was something about the way it all synced together that felt like more than… nothing,” he says self-effacingly. “And so we kept going and kept writing in all kinds of different ways. The next thing we knew, we'd written probably 10 songs and decided we should maybe book a gig!” he laughs. “And then we realised we should come up with a name. And this other bit, the band, just sort of happened without our planning.”

That name, by the way, came courtesy of Katz-Bohen’s then-four-year-old daughter. “I was asking her what her band would be called,” the keyboard player says in PGTBM’s press release, “and she said: ‘Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum.’ It was a quick reply – she didn’t even have to think about it. And I thought, wow, that’s kind of a perfect name, so I said: ‘Do you mind if I take that for my band?’ She said: ‘Yeah, go for it.’ For me, the name went really well with the music from the beginning.”

The first single the band released, in 2019, was Ketamine. A minimal electronic lament, it’s easily their most popular song on Spotify. When I ask Hall what inspired the words, he admits it was “an actual experience I had going into a therapist’s office with my then girlfriend, now wife, in which we did therapeutic, supervised doses of ketamine.

“There were two sessions. We were injected, we were both in easy chairs with some sort of curated music on the headphones and that knocked just both out for about an hour. And the song was inspired by the sense I had that we were having pretty divergent trips, as it were,” he chuckles, “and I couldn't totally give over to mine because of an awareness of hers and how it was different.

“And so I guess the lyric is maybe more broadly about the challenges of being in a relationship… I'm usually reluctant to speak to literally about lyrics, sometimes because I'm not capable. But in the case of this song, I think it was definitely inspired by real events.”

Thanks For Coming is a terrific record: intense, epic and just the right side of OTT, switching between glam, rave-rock and synthpop with a entertaining amount of theatricality lingering from the trio’s Broadway origins (reader advisory: all three wear stage make-up in their photographs, but they get away with it).

The biggest moment is Airhead, a power-ballad tricked out in gloriously Eighties synths and a belting rock-god vocal from Hall. It’s More Than A Feeling with electronic knobs on. Katz-Bohen recalls their astonishment when the song emerged in the studio: “We all looked each other and felt like we had stepped into a Boston moment with that song. It’s this massive singalong chorus that comes along and knocks you over. And it's just a lot of fun.”

Another stand-out is the trip-hoppy Bombed Out Sites, on which Beastie Boy Ad-Rock (Adam Horowitz) – an old friend of Yanowitz – supplied additional production.

“He did a remix for me a while back of one of my own songs,” says the drummer. “I was just listening to it one day and I sampled one bar of it. And I found that it created this really nice hypnotic loop. And I played it for Mike and he really liked it and we thought it kind of reminded us of like a Jane's Addiction [song] Jane Says two-chord thing.

“And Mike,” he says of Hall, “came up with this great words about this experience he had and it really had this seductive quality. It was our mixer who suggested we put it at the beginning of the record. I think it really creates this magical gateway into what we're trying to do.”

Would Mike mind paraphrasing for me what that experience was? “Um yeah,” Hall replies, shifting ever so uncomfortably. “Peter playing me that loop coincided with a time when I was looking to come up with some lyrics to talk about an experience I had with a very dear friend of mine in Southeast Asia. The two of us rented motorbikes and his had a, let's say, fuel injection issue,” he grins. "And to keep from running over a bunch of other people, he had to lay down his bike in the middle of the traffic, and he got in an accident. But everybody survived!” he clarifies.

The band’s music reveals a range of influences, from Nine Inch Nails to New Order, from Giorgio Moroder to French dance outfit Justice to, yes, AOR titans Boston. Equally diverse is Hall’s vocal range. He can do falsetto, hard rock scream, Trent Reznor intensity, John Lydon sneer and snotty English New Wave enunciation. At various times he sounds like David Bowie, whose songs he sung and one of whose personalities he incarnated in Lazarus. Created in close collaboration with Bowie, and Irish playwright Enda Walsh, it ran in New York and London in late 2015 and early 2016.

When he was promoting Safe in London in 2018, I interviewed Hall, alongside Abbington, and asked the North Carolina native about the English accent he used in the Netflix thriller. He told me: “I went for someone who’s maybe from the southern part of the country, educated, had a sort of RP delivery but not too posh. The British version of my American accent, which is no accent. I have an American accent, but in America I’m someone who doesn’t have an accent. There were kinds of accents I listened to but for the most part I tried come up with my own thing and not mimic any specific person.”

Today I ask if he applied similar thought to his singing voice. “I certainly went through periods where you’ll find a certain singer whose sound or tone you like," he acknowledges, "and you maybe try to mimic it. But ultimately, if you're trying to mimic someone else's genuine tone, you're not going to sound as good as they do, because what they're doing is more inherent.

“But I definitely am influenced by singers who characterise their voices – Bowie, of course. Within the course of a song he would sing as almost as if there were three characters singing.”

He also mentions jazz legend Sarah Vaughan. While he “wouldn't dare” compare himself to “one of the greatest voices ever, she's someone who was never bound to any kind of sound or way of singing. So that approach certainly was an influence as far as trying to [not] sound like anyone.”

What did Hall learn from working with Bowie that he brought into this, his first band? “I was a fan of his work and his music going into that project, before having met him,” he begins, carefully. “And maybe I familiarised myself more deeply, or re-familiarised myself, with a lot of his stuff for having had the chance of working with him.

“The thing I take away from that experiences is the example he set as a human being – his genuine kindness and enthusiasm and generosity and collaborative spirit. I think the biggest magic trick he would do is bring people in his presence down to earth.”

As he sees it, Bowie’s humility was a true mark of his star quality. “He's someone who could have easily just lorded over his rock god status and allowed people to just wither in their discombobulation in his presence. But instead he, without doing anything explicitly, was able to energetically look at someone in the eye, and do just that: bring you to the moment with him, person to person.

“But I don't actually remember him entering or exiting a room. I feel like he maybe just dematerialised,” he says with a still-incredulous smile. “It was amazing. When we were rehearsing the show, we'd be in the midst of a scene and he’d just pop into a rehearsal. And who does this, or who could that you know? Maybe Dylan. Somebody who walks in the room and the molecular structure of the room just changes. But he was a guy who didn't lean into that. He actually was able to diffuse it. And that was a testament to his decency and kindness.”

In sum, then, for Hall, as much as any musical experience, “I think I learned about how to be a person.”

Bowie died of liver cancer, aged 69, on January 10 2016, in the midst of the New York run of Lazarus. I was in New York that day, and went down to the street where he had lived with wife Iman. By 9am the crowds and the flowers were already piling up outside his apartment block, and it was as if the air in SoHo had stopped. How did his death impact on the man tasked at that time with inhabiting one of his great, decades-straddling characters?

“The show had opened, we were in the midst of our run, and I woke up to the news that he had died on a Monday morning,” answers Hall, who, in his late thirties, while filming series five of Dexter, underwent treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma (and whose father had died of cancer when he as 39). “And it happened to be the very Monday that all of us were going in to record the cast album.

“So in an immediate sense, I was very thankful that we were able to go straight to work and do something that was a tribute. But it was devastating, and just made the experience of breathing life into that final piece of his creative output that much more humbling. I’m so gratified that I get to just… absorb,” he say with feeling, “some of his aura.”

In fact, he credits collaborating with Bowie with giving him, as it were, some right to be in a band, rather than feeling like a thespian carpet-bagger chancing his arm.

“The fact of having worked with him and gotten whatever blessing was implicit in being invited to do that job probably has something to do with feeling like I have any business doing this,” he nods, gesturing to his bandmates in their Zoom boxes.

Meanwhile, the day-job calls. We’re speaking on a Sunday as Michael C. Hall is otherwise fully engaged filming the return of one of modern TV’s great anti-heroes, the portrayal of which won the actor two Golden Globes. He estimates they’re in the “last third or fourth of shooting the Dexter revisitation or whatever you call it!”

Infamously, of course, most fans felt Dexter ended not with a bang but a whimper, with Dexter Morgan – Miami-based police blood splatter analyst by day, vigilante serial killer by night (or whenever he got a minute) – faking his own death and disappearing to Oregon to become a (oh yes) lumberjack. Reassuringly, Hall agrees that that conclusion is the only thing needing axing.

“The ending of the series was one that was at best confounding, if not deeply frustrating for people. But I do think that the way it ended is a part of what set the stage for us to return to it and find out what happened to him.”

The events of the new, 10-episode series take place in real-time – that is, eight years have also elapsed in the show. Hall is naturally sworn to secrecy as to plot details, but I can confirm that he’s very much un-bearded during our interview.

“We're still in the midst of shooting it, but we're far enough along that I that I have a sense of what it's going to feel like. And I think for all of us involved in the project, there's some wistfulness over the fact that how mystifying the way it ended was, and a sense of responsibility and purpose that infuses our work this time around. A desire to kind of… make things right."

Despite Hall’s clean-shaven face, can he confirm that Dexter is no longer a lumberjack – please? “He always was!” he smiles. “He's only chopping down the bad trees.”

And might he be a fan of hot new fiftysomething trio Princess Goes To The Butterfly Museum? “Hmmm...” Hall muses. “Yeah, he would feel some eerie connection to the lead singer. I don't know ­– Dexter, he doesn't really listen to music that much. But I think there were actually some moments in this new version where he actually is listening to music, either because it was presented to him or because it's playing on the radio. Which has been fun. But I used to think he just listened to, like, some obscure AM radio station that just played marching bands."

Perhaps he's secretly an Abba fan. “Yeah, that sounds right, actually!” Hall laughs. You heard it here first.

Thanks For Coming (Morpho Music) is out now