Dexter Interview!

Freshly diced Dexter beauty Julie Benz has two apologies for TV Guide Magazine. The first is for being a few minutes late to her official exit interview—something she understandably would rather have skipped.

The second is for telling a little lie at our recent Hot List party: “You’re wrong!” she’d declared, when asked if her character, Rita Morgan, the eternally sunny wife of Showtime’s celebrated serial killer, was going to fall victim to John Lithgow’s Trinity Killer in the season finale. “I felt bad,” she confesses. “I even told you we shot multiple endings, which we did not.”

No worries, Julie. We get it. As TV secrets go, this was a doozy, even though we had our suspicions way back at Comic-Con last July when Lithgow spilled to his new costars that he knew something so shocking about Season 4 even they would be floored. Did he actually know Benz’s fate way back then?

“I’ve been told two different things,” says Benz, 37. “The producers and executives told me they didn’t know at the start of the season. But I’ve also been told that Lithgow did know.”

As they were drawing near the finale, Benz’s costar David Zayas (Det. Angel Batista) clued her in that Rita may not be long for Dexter’s world. “There were rumblings that something major was going to happen,” says Benz. “I even asked the producers and they said, ‘We would never kill Rita.’”

Then in late September, the day before the season finale script was to be distributed to the cast, the bomb dropped. “It was my day off, and I was called in for a meeting with the producers,” Benz recalls. “At that point, you pretty much know. It was a tough meeting. In a bizarre way, it felt like a scene from ‘Defending Your Life.’”

Producers explained they wanted to shake up the structure of the show. It was becoming more difficult to sell Dexter as a tortured soul since his life was growing increasingly idyllic in the Miami suburbs with the perfect wife and children. In fact, just before murdering Trinity and discovering Rita’s corpse, Dexter vowed to end his killing spree—which also would have ended the show.

But there’s nothing like discovering your wife’s body slumped in the bathtub with your baby boy crying in a pool of mommy’s blood to reboot your warped psyche.

“It’s a very poetic mirror to how Dexter was found when he was 3,” says Benz, who, before her four-year run on Dexter, was a “WB girl” with parts on Roswell, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Source: TV Guide Magazine