Michael C. Hall

With his piercing thousand-yard stare, Michael C. Hall has crafted some of television's most rewarding characters with clinical precision. After spending his early career on Broadway, where the soft-spoken actor appeared as the gaudy Emcee in the Cabaret revival helmed by Sam Mendes, Hall brought a white-hot intensity to the role of repressed funeral-home director David Fisher on HBO's Six Feet Under. As Fisher, Hall, through his startling physicality and restrained anger, embodied the reckless grief of a man struggling to accept life's irrationality. His portrayal of the closeted and conflicted Fisher grounded the acclaimed show, and gave it some of its most memorable and poignant moments. In 2006, Hall was cast in the lead role of the Showtime series Dexter, where his turn as blood-spatter analyst/vigilante serial killer Dexter Morgan is cleverly narrated and surprisingly relatable. A self-professed shell of a man with an uncanny ability to mimic human emotion, Hall's nuanced Dexter presents a mix of uneasy sympathy and gleeful carnage as he wrestles with heavy philosophical issues. Successfully treated for cancer in 2010, Hall displays a penchant for portraying damaged characters, while finding their cool center of intellect, and this has made him one of television's more unlikely heroes.