As the serial killer title character in “Dexter,” Michael C. Hall racked up five losses for Best Drama Actor at the Emmys. He’d also contended in that category unsuccessfully in 2002 for “Six Feet Under.” Now comes the news that he is to play President John F. Kennedy in the second season of the Netflix period drama “The Crown.”
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The first season of this prestige project has already won SAG Awards for Claire Foy, who plays the young Queen Elizabeth II, and John Lithgow who embodied the monarch’s first prime minister, the redoubtable Sir Winston Churchill. And it is sure to do well at the upcoming Emmy Awards.
One of the biggest hurdles in Hall’s pursuit of Emmy were the natures of his characters. David Fisher on “Six Feet Under” was a soft-spoken funeral director. And Dexter Morgan, a blood spatter analyst who moonlights as a vigilante killer, was a sociopath unable to feel or express normal human emotion. Emmy voters prefer to reward bold, dynamic performances with a lot of range and emotional fireworks.
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Hall and “Six Feet Under” co-star Peter Krause lost to Michael Chiklis as the no-nonsense cop on “The Shield.” Then for “Dexter,” he lost three in a row to Bryan Cranston as a cancer victim turned crystal meth manufacturer on “Breaking Bad” beginning in 2008. Then he was bested by Kyle Chandler as a tough talking football coach on “Friday Night Lights” in 2011 and by Damian Lewis as a duplicitous military man on “Homeland” in 2012.
