Honestly, I think some of my family members of a certain generation were more skittish about me playing a gay character on Six Feet Under than watching me play a killer.

I think I had a shyness about me, I think I discovered acting as a way to break out of that and as a way of belonging, a sense of being special.

My mother is a survivor who's had a lot of things happen in her life that have been very trying.

For me, it was more a dramatic shift to go from the stage to the screen.

I think Dexter is a man who ... a part of himself is very much frozen, or arrested in a place that is pre-memory, pre-conscious, pre-verbal. Something very traumatic happened to him, he doesn't know what that is. And I think on some level he wants to know. He denies his humanity, he describes himself as someone who is without feeling, and yet I think that he maybe suspects - in a way that maybe isn't even conscious yet when we first meet him - that he is in fact a human being.

Dexter's a unique killer in that his father saw his dark impulses, shined a light on them, and told Dexter that he saw them, he accepted them, that Dexter is good and that he is worthy of love. And I think that's what enables him to focus his energies in this unique way.

So it's really nice after about a year and a half to get back on stage and flex those old muscles.