Michael C Hall

Early life

Hall was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. His mother, Janice (née Styons) Hall, is a mental health counselor at Lees-McRae College, and his father, William Carlyle Hall, worked for IBM. Hall grew up an only child; his sister died in infancy before his birth. He has said of this: "There was a very one-on-one, immediate family relationship, my mom and I." His father died of prostate cancer in 1982, at the age of 39, when Hall was 11 years old. In a 2004 interview, Hall stated: "Certainly, for a young boy, there's no good age, but I think I was on the cusp of a time in my life where I was starting to reach puberty, to relate to my father. To have him.... Something gets frozen. As you revisit it for the rest of your life, it's sort of this slow but hopefully sure crawling—out of that frozen moment."

Hall graduated from Ravenscroft School in Raleigh, in 1989, and from Earlham College, a liberal arts college in Richmond, Indiana, in 1993. He has said that he planned to become a lawyer but later admitted to never actually intending to go to law school. Hall graduated from New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts in 1996.

Career

Early in life Hall discovered acting and performed in What Love Is while in second grade at Ravenscroft School. When he was in fifth grade, he began singing in a boy's choir, then in high school musicals, performing in standards such as The Sound of Music, Oklahoma!, and Fiddler on the Roof. He continued acting during his time at Earlham College, where he starred in such productions as Cabaret.

Hall's professional acting career began in the theater. Off-Broadway, he appeared in Macbeth and Cymbeline at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and in Timon of Athens and Henry V at The Public Theater, The English Teachers at the Manhattan Class Company (MCC), and the controversial play Corpus Christi at the Manhattan Theatre Club. He also performed in the workshop production of what was then known as Sondheim's Wise Guys, later versions of which were titled Bounce and, finally, Road Show. He sang the role of Paris Singer; this character's songs and function in the play were transferred to the character Hollis Bessamer in the final version of the play. In Los Angeles, Hall appeared in Skylight at the Mark Taper Forum. He also was part of the Texas Shakespeare Festival the summer of 1995. He played Lancelot in Camelot Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing.

Stage

During August 4–30, 1998, Hall performed in William Shakespeare's Cymbeline in the role of Posthumus.

In 1999, director Sam Mendes cast Hall as the flamboyant Emcee in the revival of Cabaret, Hall's first Broadway role.

In 2003, Hall toured as Billy Flynn in the musical Chicago. In 2005, he returned to Off-Broadway theater in the premiere of Noah Haidle's Mr. Marmalade, playing the title character, an emotionally disturbed little girl's imaginary friend.

In 2014, he returned to Broadway in the play The Realistic Joneses, starring in the role of John Jones.

He assumed the title role in Hedwig and The Angry Inch on Broadway on October 16, 2014 and performed the role until January 18, 2015. Hall returned to the role of Hedwig from February 17–21, 2015 to replace John Cameron Mitchell, who had a knee injury.

At the end of 2015 and the start of 2016, Hall starred as Thomas Newton in the NYTW stage production, Lazarus, created by David Bowie and Enda Walsh. Hall performed the song "Lazarus", which appeared on Bowie's final album, Blackstar (2016), on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in December 2015. He later appeared in the London production from October 25, 2016 until January 22, 2017.

Six Feet Under

Mendes suggested Hall for the role of closeted David Fisher, when Alan Ball began casting the TV drama Six Feet Under. "Everything opened up for me in Cabaret," but, Hall reported in a 2004 interview, "It slammed shut for David."

Hall's work in the first season of Six Feet Under was recognized with a nomination for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and for an AFI Award nomination for Actor of the Year in 2002 for his role as David Fisher. In addition, he shared in the Screen Actors Guild nominations for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series all of five years that the show was in production, winning the award in 2003 and 2004.

Dexter

Hall starred in and co-produced the Showtime television series Dexter, in which he played a psychopathic blood spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department who moonlights as a serial killer / vigilante. Jennifer Carpenter played his adoptive sister, Debra Morgan. The series premiered on October 1, 2006 and ended its run in 2013. For his work on Dexter, Hall was nominated for five more Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012. The show itself was also nominated for 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 Emmy citations, in the Drama Series category. He won the 2007 Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Drama. Hall was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a TV Drama in 2007 and again in 2008, and won the award at the 67th Golden Globe Awards in 2010. Also in 2010, he won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series. After months of rumors, on April 18, 2013, Showtime announced via social media that season eight would be Dexter's final season. Nevertheless, despite the constant rumors of a new series, there have not been any updates regarding a possible spinoff in the near future.

On January 16, 2014, Showtime President David Nevins said there had been discussions for a Dexter spinoff series that would take the character in a different direction and not continue the previous series. Nevins said they would only do the show if Hall agreed to return.

Hall stated he would be open to returning for a spinoff series, but said: "I can't even wrap my mind around that. And it's all just theoretical until there is some sort of script reflecting somebody's idea of where it could possibly go. But it's hard for me to imagine what that would be. Yeah, as far as playing Dexter again for an undefined amount of time, that's a little daunting to consider. But doing another television series—there's a lot of amazing stuff on TV. I don't want to do that right away. But I wouldn't say never to that."

Film

Hall's film credits include the thriller Paycheck (2003), the science fiction thriller Gamer (2009), the 2011 drama The Trouble with Bliss (2011), the comedy Peep World (2012), and Kill Your Darlings (2013). Hall performed in a film adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale's cult novel Cold in July, directed by Jim Mickle. The film premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. In the next year, Hall voiced Batman in Justice League: Gods and Monsters. Hall will portray Abraham Lincoln's advisor, Leonard Swett, in the 2017 documentary film The Gettysburg Address. Voices Toffee in Daron Nefcy's Star vs. the Forces of Evil.

Personal life

On May 1, 2002, Hall married actress Amy Spanger; he played Billy Flynn opposite her Roxie Hart in the Broadway musical Chicago, the summer after their wedding. The couple separated in 2005 and filed for divorce in 2006.

In 2007, Hall began dating his Dexter co-star Jennifer Carpenter. They eloped on New Year's Eve, 2008 in California and publicly appeared together for the first time as a married couple at the 66th Golden Globe Awards in January 2009. In December 2010, Hall and Carpenter released a statement announcing that they had filed for divorce after having been separated "for some time". The divorce was finalized in December 2011 for irreconcilable differences; however, the two remain very close friends.

In September 2012, Hall began dating Morgan Macgregor, who was an associate editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and they married on February 29, 2016.

Cancer

On January 13, 2010, Hall's agent and spokesman confirmed that Hall was undergoing treatment for a form of Hodgkin's lymphoma. In an interview, Hall said that it was upsetting to learn of his cancer when he was 38 years old, as his father had died from cancer at age 39; however, he was grateful they had found the cancer at its early stages, which made it easier to treat and cure. Hall accepted his Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award in 2010 while wearing a knitted cap over his bald head, having lost his hair due to chemotherapy. On April 25, 2010, Carpenter announced that Hall was fully in remission and was set to get back to work for a new season of Dexter.

Charity

Hall is the face of the Somalia Aid Society's Feed The People campaign. He has also worked with Kiehl's to promote a limited-edition skin care line that benefits the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental nonprofit that works toward clean and safe water worldwide.

In 2011, Hall was the celebrity spokesperson for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's "Light the Night Walk" fundraising campaign.