‘Dexter’ Season 9: Jamie Chung Joins Revival in Recurring Role

Actress Jamie Chung has joined the cast of Dexter Season 9, and will turn up in a recurring role in the forthcoming series revival. According to TV Line, Chung (Lovecraft Country) will play a Los Angeles-based true-crime podcaster who gets caught up in the plot of the 10-episode limited series, which is still somewhat enigmatic. What we do know is that the new season will pick up a decade after the series’ 2013 finale, with Michael C. Hall‘s Dexter Morgan — who we last saw working as a lumberjack in Oregon — now living in the fictional small town of Iron Lake, located in Upstate New York.

In addition to Hall and Chung, the new season will feature Clancy Brown (Billions) as Dexter’s primary rival. Brown plays Kurt Caldwell, who is described as the unofficial mayor of Iron Lake. Additional cast members include Julia Jones (Goliath) as Iron Lake’s first Native American Chief of Police and Alano Miller (Jane the Virgin) as an Iron Lake PD sergeant. There is currently no word on if any other former Dexter actors will turn up, but returning showrunner Clyde Phillips recently said in an interview on THR’s TV’s Top 5 podcast, “We basically do get to start from scratch.”

He went on to say, “We want this to not be Dexter Season 9. Ten years, or however many years, have passed by the time this will air, and the show will reflect that time passage. So far as the ending of the show, this will have no resemblance to how the original finale was. It’s a great opportunity to write a second finale.”

The Dexter finale was admittedly not a big hit with audiences or critics, but even considering that Phillips says “This is an opportunity to make that right. But that’s not why we’re doing it.” He then explained that everything from the show’s original run will stand, and any major character deaths will remain canon. “We’re not undoing anything,” Phillips stated. “We’re not going to betray the audience and say, ‘Whoops, that was all a dream.’ What happened in the first eight years happened in the first eight years.”

Notably, in a 2014 interview with The Daily Mail, Hall offered his take on the end of the show, saying that wasn’t sure he “even watched it.” He continued, “I thought it was narratively satisfying — but it was not so savory…. Just inherently because of how long we’d done it, because of the storytelling capital we’d spent, because our writers may have been gassed… Maybe some people wanted a more satisfying-maybe they wanted a happy ending for him, either a happy ending or a more definitive sense of closure.”