Murderbot's Alexander Skarsgård and Paul Weitz on Crafting an Android With Neurodivergent Traits

If you're reading this, you can probably relate to Murderbot, the titular android protagonist of Apple TV+'s new sci-fi comedy. They (the robot does not have a gender) have a difficult job that requires them to put their life on the line for their clients — but they just want to watch TV. 

Murderbot, which premiered May 16, is a show about what it means to be human. Based on a novel series by Martha Wells and developed for television by Chris and Paul Weitz, the show tells the story of a security android (played by Emmy winner Alexander Skarsgård) that hacks its own programming and achieves sentience, giving itself a private, somewhat tongue-in-cheek new name: Murderbot. It gets rented by a crew of hippie scientists who are on a mission to explore a mysterious planet, and at first it mostly keeps to itself, binge-watching thousands of episodes of TV shows on the screen inside its helmet. 

But after it acts uncharacteristically human while saving a crew member from an alien attack — it quotes a line from a TV show in an effort to comfort the distressed person — the real humans take more of an interest in their humanoid companion. Murderbot just wants to be left alone, because humans are annoying and it doesn't understand them. But as the scientists open up to it, it starts to care about them in spite of itself and take on human traits, like how an apple will start to taste like an onion if they're stored too close together. 

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The sarcastic, aloof robot is a different type of role than Skarsgård usually plays. He's known for intense, menacing characters like Eric Northman on True Blood or Perry Wright on Big Little Lies. The change of pace is what drew Skarsgård to the project, he tells TV Guide. 

"It tonally was very different from The Northman or Infinity Pool, slightly darker projects that I've done in the past couple years," he says. "I really wanted to find something a bit more comedic, tonally a bit lighter, like a little palette cleanser after those intense, dark projects. And then I just loved the scripts. It was such an unexpected character to meet in an action-packed sci-fi universe. I didn't expect the protagonist to be so socially awkward and appalled by humanity, in a way. I just thought it was a really delicious character to approach." 

Murderbot is a challenging character to approach, because it doesn't show emotion. Most of the time it stands perfectly still, not speaking or even changing its facial expression. Skarsgård had to work hard to maintain Murderbot's stillness at times, especially during comedic scenes. 

"It was sometimes hard to keep a straight face, because the other actors were incredibly funny, and would surprise me with lots of weird little things and different things in each take," he says. "It was sometimes hard to be an android and not react to it, but I tried to keep the inner monologue going and try to show as little as possible with my face and again, lean into the awkwardness of the interactions. My motivation would always be to try to get the hell out of there. I always want to extract myself from the conversation. So that was just kind of leaning into that, looking at the door, trying to figure out a way to get out." 

The Murderbot Diaries books are popular with neurodivergent people because Murderbot has the characteristics in common with many people on the autism spectrum. It has difficulty making eye contact, gets hyperfixated on its favorite TV shows, and, though it's not emotionally demonstrative, is actually quite sensitive. The Weitz brothers embraced this interpretation for the series. They wanted to show a range of ways of experiencing the world.

"The character is as the character is in the book, and it has certain characteristics which are associated with being somewhere on the spectrum, but I think that the primary thing is there's a big debate over whether that's something that needs to be fixed or not, and the core idea, to me, of the show is you shouldn't reduce personhood," Paul Weitz says. "You shouldn't say that because this person is this way, they're less human than I am — using human as a metaphor. I think eventually we're going to have to think of people as people, as opposed to humans, because eventually AI is going to be so present in our lives, and so many of us are going to fall in love with and marry AIs down the line that this will be a real question soon, but in the time being, I think that there's something about being prejudiced against other ways of thinking of and looking at the world. And all you have to do is look at Love on the Spectrum" — the Emmy-winning Netflix documentary series about the dating lives of several people on the autism spectrum — "to see how much humanity and beauty there is in autistic people."  

The show's very of-the-moment themes of acceptance of people with different minds and AI becoming self-aware may resonate with many viewers, but one of the most striking things about it is something a bit broadcast sitcom old-fashioned: most of the episodes are under 30 minutes long. Weitz says they didn't want to overstay their welcome. The book the season is based on is short, and meeting the usual hour length of a sci-fi series would require padding out the writing, and they didn't want to do that. "We wanted this to be the kind of thing that felt like listening to a really classic pop song," Weitz says. 

The first two episodes of Murderbot are now streaming on Apple TV+. New episodes release weekly on Fridays through July 11.