Hall of love and death

Michael C. Hall sits near the window, his deep-set eyes further shadowed under the bill of a blue cap. It’s sunny outside, but the ancient Hollywood eatery where we’re meeting is as dusky and quiet as, well, a funeral home. All that’s missing is some fellow diner choking on a piece of roast beef, soon to become Six Feet Under’s next corpse of the week.

Not that the 33-year-old star of the HBO series, which returns for a fourth season on June 13, needs help getting into character. In his intense performance, Hall embodies David Fisher, the gay Los Angeles funeral director “with doormat issues” (as Hall puts it) who has broken free of the closet only to land in an obsessive love affair with red-hot black cop Keith (Mathew St. Patrick).

In person, Hall conveys much of David’s wariness. The 33-year-old North Carolina native is polite, reserved, good-looking, well-bred. He focused on New York theater before being cast on Six Feet Under, which is why most of us know him only as the buttoned-down character he plays. And why we might be surprised to learn that Hall played 500 Broadway performances in lipstick, leather, and rouge as the Emcee in Cabaret. Show director Sam Mendes (who would later be known for directing the film American Beauty) hired Hall in 1999 for the musical revival to replace Alan Cumming, who created the role and set the flamboyance bar exceedingly high. Hall learned the show and in three weeks was leading it. “It was fantastic!” he remembers. “I had the time of my life.”

Then he would get the call to read for…a closeted funeral director? No problem. Alan Ball (fresh off American Beauty himself, for which he won an Oscar for his screenplay) was casting a show that would puncture TV niceties with a series about a family of morticians whose lives work around the business of death. The uptight gay son would begin the show deeply closeted. “Everything I opened up for Cabaret,” Hall says, “I slammed shut for David.”

“We did four days of casting in New York,” Ball remembers, “and I heard about Michael C. Hall right before he walked in the door. Then he started reading, and I just saw the character come to life. And it was David.”

Hall has a leg up on the youngest Fisher son in terms of finding happiness. Two years ago he married fellow actor Amy Spanger; on his last hiatus the two toured together in the musical Chicago, with Spanger as Roxie Hart and Hall strutting his stuff as showboating lawyer Billy Flynn.

But most fans don’t separate Michael from David. When Hall is out and about, people step right up to scold their favorite gay mortician—or, more often, to give him a dose of encouragement.

Part of the reason we wanted to know more about you, Michael, is that we know you have to be less repressed than David. And I just wonder what that’s like—playing a character who’s so shut down.
You mean, knowing that no matter what happens, I’ll probably be associated with this role? That will unfold as it will. I certainly know there are people in positions of power in the business who lack imagination and, perhaps as a result of that, think of me as David. But I wouldn’t really want to work with those people, you know?

I’d rather play David than pretty much any other television character I can think of. It’s not like I took the part or pursued the part even though he was gay. I pursued the part because he was a gay man. He’s inherently conflicted and inherently dramatic as a result.

How would you describe Michael, as opposed to David?
I’m definitely not as fastidious as David.

Shall we say “sloppy”?
Yeah, sloppy. Ultimately, I’m a mess. I don’t mean I’m a mess, like, emotionally—I mean, I think probably everybody’s a mess. David’s a mess. But I’m talking about…I’m messy. [Chuckles]

Do fans know the difference?
Generally people respond to the work we do as acting. I mean, yeah, people see me and some of them think, Oh, my God, David Fisher! But I’d rather they think Oh, my God, David Fisher than Oh, my God…well, I don’t want to dis any other [shows].

You are a Southern gentleman.
Oh, yeah. Well, you know…Mom’s gonna read this.

Is there anything that you find difficult to do in the character of David?
Over the course of the first season, spending that much time in a place characterized by that much tension and self-loathing…it wears on you. I think [now] I’m better at moving in and out of David. The challenge is always just to be the guardian of this guy’s truth.

Are you suffering from the character’s internalized homophobia?
Honestly, no. But that’s an irony that nobody’s ever touched on before. In a strange way, playing David during the first season required me to get in touch with my homophobia. He had such internalized loathing for who he was. I certainly have moved forward in my life, in my own relationship to my self-loathing, by having played David.

Your own self-loathing?
I don’t think closeted homosexual morticians have the market cornered on self-loathing or sense of shame.

[Laughs] Definitely not.
It means reexamining, through the prism of David, the world that I grew up in and the messages I got about being gay. At NYU we were trained to ask this magical “What if?” I look at my life and think of the messages sent to me about being gay—and filter those through the sense of “What if I were a closeted homosexual when I heard those things? What would that have meant to me?”

What did you learn?
I think David comes to discover that he’s been his own worst enemy, and it’s really his own internalized disapproval and disgust, his own internalized homophobia, that must be reckoned with. It’s not about changing the rest of the world, it’s about changing himself.

You mentioned the world you grew up in. I know you’re an only child, grew up in North Carolina, went to college in Indiana, and studied acting at New York University. What did you like when you were little? What did you want to do?
There was always an impulse to perform in one way or another. Most of my experiences performing growing up were doing musicals, singing, being in choirs—I sang in choirs when I was in college as well. I was a choir geek the first couple of years. Then I became a theater geek. I took an acting class my sophomore year and realized that in terms of [my] enthusiasm and aptitude, it was definitely the thing.

Why do you think that was?
I had a lot of stuff going through my head. I think as an only child—technically, I’m not, because my mother had a daughter who died in infancy before I was born. And my father passed away when I was 11. So there was a very one-on-one, immediate family relationship, my mom and I.

That’s a powerful bond.
At that age, 11, my father’s death was a real marker. 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—or as a result, I was becoming more like him. 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.

Does it seem especially poignant talking to Richard Jenkins [as David’s father] when you do scenes with him?
Certainly when I did the pilot episode. There’s that scene where David is working on his father’s body and having a conversation with his father. And of course the father, whenever he shows up—for the most part, I think he represents whatever internalized version of the father [that a character seeing him has], and the internalized version David has is obviously critical and less than generous.

What does your mom make of David?
She certainly grew up in an world where homosexuality, I think, was equated with weakness. I don’t think she feels that way now. But I remember a time when I was doing a community theater production in Raleigh [N.C.]—and I went to lunch with my mom and a friend who was a doctor, I believe. [Afterward] my mom communicated to me that the doctor sort of warned her, “The theater is a place where there are a lot of homosexuals.” Thankfully, for whatever reason, when I heard that, I thought, That’s fucked-up. [Laughs] But what kind of number would that have done on me if I were gay?

Were there gay people in your life growing up?
I had a job in high school moving furniture for this interior design firm that was owned and operated by a couple of gay men.

What impression did they make on you?
I certainly was impressed with what seemed to be a refined aesthetic sense on their part [Stockwell laughs] and an ability to enjoy being alive. There seemed to be sort of a celebratory aspect to the way that they were living their lives. And I do think I grew up in an environment in which, in subtle ways, enthusiasm was not necessarily encouraged. There is something wonderful about celebrating who you are, especially if it follows a period where you get everything but that.

When you first saw the script for Six Feet Under, did you think, Oh, my God, if it’s bad, it’s gonna be awful.
[Laughs] I didn’t. I did anticipate that the show would find an audience. I mean, it had a built-in group of people leaning forward because of Alan Ball, the HBO pedigree, the success of Sex and the City, and all that. I had a lot of respect for Alan because of the work he’d done on American Beauty but also the work he’d done on this script. I felt that within 15 pages he’d managed to create so many characters with such dimension and vividness.

What did your mother say when you called her up and said, “I got this part—it could be great for me—it’s a gay mortician in Hollywood”?
My mom probably would never even cop to it, but I think she definitely exercised some restraint at certain points in my career in terms of her withholding any judgment. I remember one time we went home and saw some old friends, and out of the blue one of the friends said to me, “And I just want to compliment your mother, because she has dealt with this so well.” As if my success were a burden on her because of the nature of [my role]. Well, basically, it was almost as if she were saying, “She has dealt with the fact that you have come out so well.” [Chuckles]