“That’s why [their] presence was fundamental,” Hall says. “This revisitation was totally unique for many reasons, one being that all the scripts were written from the beginning so we were able to shoot it as if it were a 10-hour movie. And Marcos’ presence throughout the shoot [either as director or producer]. It’s great to have that single presence as long as it’s a presence that you trust.”

The question of authorship in television is often a complex one. The medium is quite different to film, where the director’s word is law. Television is often, instead, driven by writer/producers who travel by the moniker of “showrunner”. For a show like Dexter, too, the question is made even more complex because of the deep and long-standing connection between actor and character. Which is not to say that Hall writes Dexter, but that he knows him better than perhaps anyone else.

“When the show ended there were instances where the possibility of a return materialised and it just never felt right. I knew that a return would only happen if [a] story emerged that felt like it was worth telling. And I had to take responsibility for that feeling and take part in crafting that story.”

In a sense, while the story is creatively driven by Phillips, and traces its genesis to a series of novels written by Jeff Lindsay, beginning with 2004’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Hall was also “very much part of the conversation”, he says. “And in as much as Dexter is even knowable, I guess it’s on me to know him and to know what does and doesn’t feel right and feels [a] worthy subject for what we hope is a satisfying revisitation of this character. One that’s in part motivated by what we all know was a somewhat dissatisfying place where we left them.”

That last point is a peculiar one for this reboot. The history of television is peppered with television programs whose endings were either tearfully and lovingly applauded, or greeted with muted silence. The manner of Dexter’s ending – no spoilers here, for the sake of newbies catching up ahead of the reboot – drew an uneasy line down the middle.

Seemingly satisfactory to most, it never sat well with diehard fans. And, unusually in television, where ranks rarely break, Hall himself made no secret that he was not wholly satisfied with the show’s original ending. “We definitely had as a part of our motivation to return the dissatisfaction of the audience and our own dissatisfaction in mind,” Hall says. “I certainly support and stand by where things ended with the original series ... but I also appreciate how open-ended and fundamentally dissatisfying if not infuriating it was for people watching.

“But if that is a cloud that’s hung over the show, it has perhaps provided us a chance to create a silver lining,” Hall says. “And hopefully this return will be that. But yes, that was a big part of our awareness. And I was saddened to know that a show that was beloved and that people generally had a lot of affection for ultimately left a lot of a bad taste in people’s mouths.”

When Hall played Dexter in the original series, he came to see the two aspects of the character – the charming man the audience meets, and the so-called “dark passenger” within him – as two halves of a whole.

“When we first meet Dexter, he is more the two distinct aspects, one an authentic, monstrous serial killer and one assimilated, real-seeming person,” Hall says. “It’s really the appearance of his brother in the very first season that whets his appetite to have a more authentic experience of himself as a human being, and gets the ball rolling and causes those two separate things to intersect in more and more dangerous ways.”

But the Dexter of both the original series conclusion and the reboot is a world away from the Dexter we met in Lindsay’s book Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Hall says. “For the very reason that this simulated human being and this real monster have intersected in ways that Dexter had believed were incompatible.”

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If Dexter’s darker side were to re-emerge – “and we’re turning the cameras back on, so we can reasonably suspect that it might”, Hall suggests – Dexter may be forced to deal with both aspects of himself in a way not seen before. “I don’t think anybody believes that Dexter is completely incapable of a [genuinely human] experience,” Hall says.

Which is not to say that Dexter Morgan is a good guy. But it does seem to suggest that he is not wholly a bad one. “I think to some degree he feels like [redemption] is not possible or deserved,” Hall says. “But I do also think that there’s some part of him that’s waiting for something, he doesn’t know what. And what that waiting might be for is perhaps revealed to him in this new show.”

Dexter: New Blood is on Paramount+ from Sunday.

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