John Lithgow Reprising Trinity Killer Role For Dexter Revival

A surprising but beloved name is coming back for Showtime’s Dexter revival in John Lithgow, who will be playing the Trinity Killer once again. Deadline reports that Lithgow is reprising the role that earned him an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama, that of Arthur Miller from the 2010 fourth season of the show’s original run.

Arthur Miller was perhaps Dexter Morgan’s most formidable adversary, a family man who like Dexter hid his serial killing activities as the Trinity Killer, one of the most prolific serial killers in America in the show. Dexter was fascinated by Miller’s ability to balance his two lives and befriended him. While Dexter did definitively kill Arthur, he did not do so before Arthur killed Dexter’s wife Rita and left their son in her blood, thus mirroring the situation in which Dexter was traumatized as a child.

It’s not clear currently how Arthur will factor into the new show, though Deadline notes Lithgow is only expected to film for a day. Dexter had a habit of imagining dead people from his past in the original run (specifically his father), so such a sequence or a flashback would both be possible reasons. However, neither of those are confirmed at this time.

The revival will be set 10 years after Dexter went missing in a hurricane at the end of the show’s original run, and finds him living under the fake name of Jim Lindsay in a world away from Miami. Michael C. Hall is back to reprise his titular role in a cast that includes newcomers Clancy Brown, Julia Jones, Michael Cyril Creighton, Alano Miller, Johnny Sequoyah, Jack Alcott, Jamie Chung, and Oscar Wahlberg.