Peter Iovino / ShowtimeTalk about scary! British tabs, including the Daily Star, are reporting a frightening incident on the Dexter set:
Jimmy Smits, who plays District Attorney Miguel Prado on the Showtime drama, apparently grabbed a real knife during one scene, and would have stabbed stuntman Jeff Chase through the heart had Chase not been wearing a small piece of plastic that shielded him from the blade.
Showtime has not responded to a request for confirmation, so this could all be a big misunderstanding, but what supposedly went wrong? Well...Be warned, major spoilers follow!
According to the Daily Star, Chase was tied to a table in Dexter's classic plastic-wrap and duct-tape restraints, which meant he was helpless to call out a warning when he saw that Smits had the wrong knife.
"I heard fellow actor Michael C. Hall yelling at Jimmy to stop, but it was too late. I felt the thud in my chest," the paper reported Chase saying. He miraculously survived without a scratch.
Dexter boss Clyde Phillips has told me that Smits is the nicest, most decent guy you could hope to meet, and the actor was said to be understandably devastated when he realized his mistake. Chase told the Daily Star, "[Jimmy] couldn't stop apologizing. I told him I felt more sorry for him than me."
But why, oh why was Jimmy Smits wielding knives in what sounds like one of Dexter's kill rooms?
Well, I didn't want to spill this too soon and ruin the twist for anyone, but Dexter and Prado might just become murder buddies. This season was advertised as the year that "the student becomes the master," meaning that it's come time for Dexter to pass along his homicidal wisdom to an eager pupil...
I've known about the possibility of this tag-team effort for a while now, and I recently enticed Valerie Cruz, who plays Prado's wife, to talk about whether her character and Dexter's Rita (Julie Benz) ever get wise to their husbands' extracurricular activities. She told me, "The wives are so unaware that their husbands are murdering people! You forgive them because they obviously think that something's going on, but they try to liken it to what normal women would perceive: an affair or an addiction. So you never think, whoa, these girls are dum-dums!"
Valerie also told me, "[This season] so much becomes [known] about Dexter and Miguel. The rest falls by the wayside. What I think about the scripts this year is that there are so many stories going on and you think one story is going to break and be the story, but it's not. They were really smart this year—they gave themselves a lot of options."
What do you guys think about this turn? Post your thoughts on Dexter and Miguel's partnership in the comments along with your wishes for the cast and crew to finish out the season in a safe and totally uneventful manner!