Dexter marked a pretty major milestone for Julia Stiles. Minus a six-episode run on the kids’ mystery series Ghostwriter in the early 90s, Dexter was her first significant TV credit, and one that paved the way to an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series nonetheless.
Stiles joined the show in Season 5 as Lumen Pierce, a victim of the Barrel Girl Gang. When Dexter (Michael C. Hall) is in the midst of performing his kill ritual on one of the gang members, Lumen catches him in the act. While the start of their relationship is filled with doubt and mistrust, ultimately they team up with Dexter helping Lumen take out her attackers and with Lumen becoming one of very few who’s aware of Dexter’s true colors.
With Season 2 of Riviera kicking off on Ovation TV on Saturday, May 8th, Stiles took the time to join us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night to discuss the journey from her earliest credits to Riviera, and of course, that includes Dexter. And it turns out, Dexter in particular played a pivotal role in opening Stiles up to television opportunities. Here’s how she put it:
“It was great. It was my first introduction to a cable drama. And I remember back then, cable had just started to become great and really appealing to actors. I had always had this fear of, if you sign up for a TV show, which would be like a six-year contract, is it gonna end up being something that you didn’t anticipate or something that wasn’t really what you signed up for? And Dexter totally changed my mind about that so that then I could go on to do Riviera and feel really confident that working on a 13-episode drama is a really fun job and can be really rewarding for actors.”
While one might suspect joining a hit series at the height of its run comes loaded with pressure and nerves, Stiles insisted that wasn’t the case here:
“In some ways the pressure was off because I wasn’t the lead on Dexter. I wasn’t a series regular, but to come in and love what they wrote for me and to come in and be able to play that part for one season was really great and it made me want to do more TV.”
If you’re looking for more from Stiles, you’re going to want to keep an eye out for her episode of Collider Ladies Night arriving this weekend. Not only did we talk Dexter and Riviera, but we also revisited her 90s classic 10 Things I Hate About You, discussed the fact that her Bourne Identity character was meant to die in that first film, got a tease of what to expect from the Orphan sequel, Orphan: First Kill, and so much more!