Michael C. Hall said he identifies as “not all the way heterosexual” in a candid new interview about his sexuality.
The Golden Globe–winning actor, who starred on the HBO series “Six Feet Under” as gay mortician David Fisher, has been drawn to playing LGBTQ characters throughout his career on stage and screen.
Speaking with The Daily Beast, Hall reflected on discovering his sexual fluidity in relation to some of his best-known roles, despite never having an “intimate” relationship with a man.
“I think there’s a spectrum. I am on it. I’m heterosexual,” he explained. “But if there was a percentage, I would say I was not all the way heterosexual.”
Playing the gender nonconforming emcee in “Cabaret,” Hall said, allowed him to “fling a bunch of doors wide open” in terms of his own sexuality, as he locked lips his co-star Michael Stuhlbarg every night.
“I think I have always leaned into any fluidity in terms of my sexuality,” he added.
Hall has wed three times. He married actress Amy Spanger, who starred opposite him in the Broadway musical “Chicago” in 2002. He famously tied the knot with his “Dexter” co-star Jennifer Carpenter in 2008, but they divorced two years later. In 2016 he married longtime girlfriend Morgan Macgregor, a book critic and writer.
Hall chalks up some of that fluidity to a “craving for an emotional intimacy with a man” due to a fraught relationship with his father, who died when the actor was 11 years old.
“I don’t mean to suggest that an emotional relationship between a father and son is any way homoerotic,” he said. “I mean an emotional intimacy or connection that at least in the milieu I grew up in was considered fey. I had an appetite to have emotional connections with men beyond beer, sports, and fist pumping that were considered ‘gay.’”
And while Hall doesn’t consider himself entirely heterosexual, he does note the sensitivity surrounding LGBTQ representation on screen and the recent public conversations about straight actors playing gay roles.
“I was playing this aspirationally iconic gay role as a straight man,” he said of his role in “Six Feet Under. “I felt all the more charged to do it justice. I certainly understand anyone who takes issue with the phenomenon.”
To read Hall’s full interview, head over to The Daily Beast.