Showtime’s Dexter revival continues to come into focus.
The update from original showrunner Clyde Phillips and star Michael C. Hall has enlisted Jamie Chung (Lovecraft Country) and Oscar Wahlberg (Manchester By the Sea) for recurring roles.
The 10-episode revival is set 10 years after Dexter Morgan (Hall) went missing in the eye of Hurricane Laura. The character is now living under an assumed name in Upstate New York — far from his original home in Miami.
Chung will play Molly, a famous true-crime podcaster from Los Angeles. Wahlberg will play Zach, the captain of the Iron Lake High School wrestling team. He’s a bit of a bully, but generally the go-to-guy to have a good time. He’s the gateway to the in-crowd, which includes the daughter of the chief of police.
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Chung is fresh off an acclaimed role in HBO’s Lovecraft Country. Her credits include The Gifted, Office Christmas Party, Gotham, Once Upon a Time and Eden. She’s repped by Gersh, 3 Arts and Morris Yorn.
Wahlberg (the son of Robert Wahlberg and whose uncle is Mark Wahlberg) counts Louie, NOS4A2, Daddy’s Home and Slender Man among his scredits. He’s repped by the Andrew Wilson Agency and Thruline Entertainment.
Chung and Wahlberg join recurring player Michael Cyril Creighton in the Dexter update. Hall reprises his role as the serial killer with a conscience and leads the Dexter revival cast that also includes Clancy Brown as the primary villain, Julia Jones as the town’s chief of police, Alano Miller as a sergeant/high school wrestling coach, Johnny Sequoyah as the chief’s daughter and Jack Alcott as Randall, someone with whom Dexter has a meaningful encounter.
Production on the updated Dexter is scheduled to begin this month in Massachusetts. In addition to Hall and Phillips, exec producers also include John Goldwyn, Sara Colleton, Bill Carraro, Scott Reynolds and Marcos Siega, the latter of whom will direct six of the 10 episodes.
The Dexter revival will be again run by Phillips and is technically considered a closed-ended revival though it does continue the original series. Dexter, which Phillips left halfway through its run, ended in 2013 with Hall’s Dexter Morgan going on self-imposed exile as a lumberjack in Oregon and living a solitary life.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter‘s TV’s Top 5 podcast, Phillips said, “We basically do get to start from scratch. … Ten years, or however many years, have passed by the time this will air, and the show will reflect that time passage. So far as the ending of the show, this will have no resemblance to how the original finale was. It’s a great opportunity to write a second finale.”
Phillips noted the revival would offer an opportunity to make things right with viewers after the critically panned series finale. “We’re not undoing anything,” he said. “We’re not going to betray the audience and say, ‘Whoops, that was all a dream.’ What happened in the first eight years, happened in the first eight years.”
For his part, Hall recently told the Daily Beast that he found Phillips’ pitch for the revival intriguing after the original series finale. “[L]et’s be real: people found the way that show left things pretty unsatisfying, and there’s always been a hope that a story would emerge that would be worth telling. I include myself in the group of people that wondered, ‘What the hell happened to that guy?’ So I’m excited to step back into it. I’ve never had that experience of playing a character this many years on,” he said.
The Dexter update is expected to air this fall on Showtime.
