Here's your first look at Alexander Skarsgård as Apple's Murderbot
Don't worry: Murderbot—a cyborg after our own hearts—is too busy obsessively watching TV shows to actually murder anybody.
Photo: Apple TV+
We’ll admit to being a bit flummoxed last December, when news broke that Alexander Skarsgård had been cast as the lead in Apple TV+’s adaptation of Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. To be fair, the bestselling sci-fi book series draws a lot of its power and fun from the fact that it situates readers firmly inside the head and voice of its title character, a space-faring, semi-organic “Security Unit” who went quietly sentient while nobody was looking, and who splits its time between keeping squishy, stupid humans safe from the harm they constantly strive to put themselves in, and obsessively watching TV shows. (The “Murderbot” thing is sarcastic, by the way, a good sample of the tone Wells establishes for her frequently acerbic, but never actually murderous, first-person narrator.) And since we only ever “see” Murderbot through other peoples’ reactions to it, we, personally, somehow never imagined it whipping off its face-obscuring (and attention-deflecting) helmet and revealing Skarsgård’s famously steely looks underneath.
