Rita’s OG Dexter Actor Officially Returns For New Franchise Episode 17 Years After Character Death

Julie Benz, the actor who played Rita Bennett on Dexter, is back in the psychological thriller franchise in a brand-new way.

When Dexter premiered in 2006, Benz was one of the original cast members alongside Michael C. Hall, Jennifer Carpenter, Erik King and Lauren Vélez. However, her character, Rita, didn’t last the entire series; Arthur Mitchell (aka the Trinity Killer) killed her in Dexter season 4. Benz returned for the fifth season premiere in a flashback with Hall’s Dexter Morgan.

Now, 17 years after Rita’s death, Benz has returned to the world of Dexter via the official companion web series, Dexter’s Kill Room, which returned for its third season in early August. Episode 4 saw Benz and King reunite on the couch with a bowl of popcorn to reflect on their time playing Rita and James Doakes, respectively.

During the interaction, Benz admitted that she always thought of Rita as being like a damaged bird. “She had this little damaged wing, but she would still keep trying to fly,” the actress explained, adding that she loved the season 1 version of Rita the best.

“I love season 1 Rita the best. And I always viewed her as this damaged bird. Like she had this little damaged wing, but she still kept trying to fly. It was like, ‘I’m going to fly. Even if I only get this far off the ground, I’m still going to try with my damaged little wing.'”

Benz also claimed that back when she read the script for the pilot, she knew right away that Dexter would be a hit show.

While filming the pilot, she went out for dinner with Hall one night and told him that not only would Showtime order a full season of Dexter, but that it would “run for years.” She thought this because the show “lives in this gray moral zone” and “makes you really think.”

“When I read the pilot script before I even had the role, I thought this is the type of show I want to watch. This show, it’s going to be a success. And I remember during shooting the pilot, Michael and I went out to dinner and he asked me my thoughts of the show about the pilot and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s getting picked up, and it’s going to run for years. This is a hit.’ And he was like, ‘Why do you think that?’ And I’m like, ‘Because it’s something I want to watch. Because it lives in this gray moral zone, and it doesn’t force-feed you an answer. It makes you really think. And this is the type of television I like watching. So, it’s going to be a huge hit.'”

Benz and King also discussed Rita’s death, with the former admitting that she had never watched that scene. She found the whole experience hard to film and had only found out about her character’s death a couple of days prior to shooting it.

“I was devastated,” she said, adding that her boyfriend at the time (now husband) threw her a party in her trailer since he wanted her to “approach it as a celebration and not as an ending.“

“From the minute I found out it was happening, it was hard to film. I only found out a couple days before, and I was devastated. But this scene specifically, it was the very last scene of the season that we shot, and the crew only found out right when they went to set up for it.

“But my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, threw a party in my trailer. He wanted me to approach it as a celebration and not as an ending. So I had done a couple tequila shots. I just had to play dead. That’s not hard. It’s really not hard to do. So, I was partying in the trailer with my friends as we were filming this, and he decorated my trailer with tombstones. It was around Halloween, so they went and got all these fun—him and his friends—and they decorated my trailer. And so, then I came out and floated a tombstone in the bathtub during rehearsal ’cause the crew was really sad. They didn’t know this was happening. So I tried to make it as fun as I could even though I was very, very sad.”

Even though Benz never returned to Dexter or any of the spinoffs, King did make a guest appearance in Dexter: Resurrection season 1, which aired in 2025. Other Dexter spinoffs over the years include New Blood and Original Sin.

After she departed from Dexter, Benz went on to appear on shows like Desperate Housewives, No Ordinary Family, A Gifted Man, Defiance, Hawaii Five-0, Training Day and On Becoming a God in Central Florida. More recently, she guest starred on 9-1-1: Lone Star and starred in the film The Midway Point.

Just this season alone, Dexter’s Killing Room has already brought back Krysten Ritter, Eric Stonestreet, Scott Reynolds, Jack Alcott, C.S. Lee, Jaime Murray, Benz and King to reminisce about the long-running franchise. New episodes are released on Dexter‘s YouTube channel every Thursday at 12 p.m. EDT. Then Dexter: Resurrection season 2 will premiere this fall on Paramount+ Premium and Showtime.