Michael Carlyle Hall (born February 1, 1971) is an American actor and singer best known for his roles as Dexter Morgan, the titular character in the Showtime series Dexter, and David Fisher in the HBO drama series Six Feet Under. These two roles collectively earned Hall a Golden Globe Award and three Screen Actors Guild Awards. He has also acted in Broadway shows and narrated audiobooks. Born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, Hall graduated from New York University's graduate acting program at the Tisch School of the Arts in 1996. He began his acting career on Broadway in the revival of Cabaret and appeared in a variety of shows in the mid- to late 1990s. Aside from his acclaimed roles on Six Feet Under and Dexter, he starred in the Broadway musical Hedwig and The Angry Inch from 2014 to 2015. He has also starred in films including Paycheck (2003), Gamer (2009), Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House (2017), Game Night (2018), and In the Shadow of the Moon (2019). In 2021, he reprised his role of Dexter Morgan for the miniseries revival Dexter: New Blood. 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, 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 11 years old. He has said of this, "There was a very one-on-one, immediate family relationship, my mom and I." In a 2004 interview, Hall spoke about his experience in the wake of his father's death: "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. While he has said that he had planned to become a lawyer, he later acknowledged that he had never formed a serious intent to