Love her or hate her (and we know some of you out there hated her by Season 4), the late Rita Morgan will no longer grace the set of Dexter. After Sunday’s whopper of a finale, which pulverized ratings records for Showtime, Julie Benz is sharing her reaction to the killing off of the character she made her own for four years. Here’s some of the best from her recent interview with E!’s Kristin Dos Santos.
Will Rita come back as a ghost, the way Harry does?
“There has been no talk of me coming back to the series in any way. A lot of people have been begging me to tell them that I’m going to come back, and I’m like, ‘Rita’s dead!’ Rita is dead and Trinity killed her. There’s all these theories that Dexter did it, or Deb snuck in and did it, but I don’t think it could get any more obvious that Trinity killed Rita. Rita is dead. And there has been no talk of Rita being a ghost. No one’s approached me about coming back.”
Why Rita? And why did her death have to be so horrifying?
It is tough, and my first reaction was, ‘You’re killing the mother of the show! You’re killing the woman who’s suffered more violence than anybody!’ She suffered more violence than Dexter ever suffered. Dexter witnessed the death of his mother, but he didn’t suffer any physical violence. Rita was beaten and raped by an ex-husband on a regular basis, and yet she still has this innocence and sweetness about her.
… When they first told me I was dying, they didn’t tell me how I was dying, and I thought I was going to be the jumper off the building, which for some reason isn’t as graphic. I did feel anger about them taking this innocent, sweet woman in such a violent and terrifying way—which we know from the woman in the bathtub in the first episode.
How did the cast react?
There were a lot of tears the whole last week. When I found out, I called Jennifer (Carpenter, who plays Debra Morgan) right as I was leaving the offices, and she thought I was playing a joke. She couldn’t believe it. She was shocked. And then the producers told the rest of the cast because after telling Jennifer I just said I can’t do it. It’s too hard. I get really emotional thinking about it. It was my family and my favorite place to go every day.
How do you feel about Rita’s death now?
When you make a bold move to kill off a main character, and a bold move to kill off the mother of a newborn, it’s a fifty-fifty shot, and kudos to them for taking that risk. So many other shows, so many other networks would have shied away from it. I really hope that it pays off, because I would really hate to see Rita’s death be in vain and to lose viewers. I hope it catapults the show to a whole other level. I hope it opens the story up to so much more drama. I hope it opens Dexter up to finally releasing the Dark Passenger within him—let’s see the monster that he really is.
Final thoughts? And what will happen to Harrison?
I assume Astor and Cody will go with their grandparents, but what about Harrison? I know that one option is to have them jump ahead in time. They have the option of taking the story creatively wherever they want. But of course I worry about Harrison. The first thing I said when they told me about Rita’s death was, ‘What about the children?!’ I felt like a real mother, and I will be tuning in to make sure that Harrison is taken care of.
Stay tuned, Dexter fans. We’ll have a photo gallery of Rita from Season 4 and an update on Benz’ plans for the future.
Photo: Randy Tepper/Showtime