'Dexter': Trinity Killer John Lithgow's spirit will live on next season

John Lithgow may be gone from "Dexter" physically, but that doesn't mean he won't still be around next season.

The Emmy-, Tony- and Golden Globe Award-winning actor expects to be seen in flashbacks as "The Trinity Killer" when the Showtime drama series' fifth round begins, likely in September. He won't be shooting new footage, though; any such sequences will be drawn from his past scenes, which ended just before Miami pollce pathologist Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) discovered how big a toll Trinity had taken on his life.

(Spoiler alert: By the time he was killed by Dexter, Trinity had killed Dexter's wife Rita, played by Julie Benz.)

"Ghosts hang over Dexter and continue to haunt him," Lithgow tells Zap2it, "so I figure I'll probably turn up now and then, but I've done my last acting on 'Dexter.' I certainly will be watching the new season, because [working on the show] turned me into a huge 'Dexter' fan.

"My two big TV experiences were 'Dexter' and '3rd Rock From the Sun,' and in a curious way, they sort of resembled each other. They were both real ensemble pieces, and I loved the fact that one of them was crazy-funny while the other was horrifically suspenseful."

Returning for a second year as host of the family-friendly Turner Classic Movies series "The Essentials Jr." starting Sunday, June 6, Lithgow has just recorded an audio commentary for the season-four "Dexter" DVD set. He advises adults to keep his "Dexter" work hidden from his younger fans, but he adds, "That's what you look for as an actor, a way of taking the audience on a hell of a trip. It was really fun."

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Photo credit: Showtime