Murderbot’s Main Character Is Both Killing Machine and Sci-Fi Nerd

Murderbot creators, writers, directors, and executive producers (and brothers) Chris and Paul Weitz are huge fans of the Martha Wells Murderbot Diaries books, and they approached their Apple TV+ series from the same perspective. Sci-fi fans like what they like, including the show’s main character, played by Alexander Skarsgård: a Security Unit that’s hacked its own system, gained free will, and discovered the wild world of trashy TV.

Its favorite show is The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, a soapy space opera that most of the other characters disdain but Murderbot considers to be “premium entertainment.” And it would know: by the time we meet it on Murderbot, it’s consumed thousands of hours of entertainment programming.

It enjoys the show, but Sanctuary Moon proves to be surprisingly influential, too, giving SecUnit much-needed inspiration when it needs it the most.

“We loved the books. We wanted to treat this as if the character really existed,” Paul Weitz told io9 at a recent Murderbot press day. “So because Murderbot is so obsessed with it, [Sanctuary Moon and the other media was] something that we could do in the show that was true, we felt. And every step of the way, we were checking in with Martha Wells, showing her visuals, sending her scripts. So we knew that she was going to get a kick out of it as well. But we wanted to see what Murderbot was into.”

He continued. “Also, we love the idea that other people are disrespectful of what Murderbot is into, but that it sticks to its guns through the end. It’s having this big adventure. It’s having to sort of be in an action sci-fi show, but it does just want to watch [Sanctuary Moon]. So we thought it was really important to check in with it.”

As for creating The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon as a show within the show, the team aimed to do the exact opposite of Murderbot itself: it’s bright, it’s corny, and it’s full of familiar faces giving deliberately over-the-top performances.

“In terms of the texture of the show itself, we would put every kind of maximalist instinct that we had, which wasn’t appropriate for Murderbot, into Sanctuary Moon,” Chris Weitz said. “So the colors are amped up. It’s shot on a virtual stage as opposed to in actual locations, which was the rule for the on-planet scenes in Murderbot. We were also dialing up friends of ours, especially ones who had experience in big franchises, because there’s something about fandom as well that we were sort of playing on.”

“So John [Cho] being in Star Trek and Clark Gregg from the MCU and DeWanda [Wise] having been in the Jurassic World franchise, as well as the weird kind of meta friendship of Jack McBrayer and [Alexander Skarsgård]—it’s a real friendship. It’s just there’s a kind of a meta aspect to it. So it was a fun repository for all of those strange notions.”

Murderbot‘s first two episodes arrive May 16 on Apple TV+.

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