Robotic Acting? 10 Stars Who Went Android on Television
Alexander Skarsgård is taking a turn for the mechanical with his latest TV role, having signed on to executive produce and star in Murderbot for Apple TV+
The sci-fi drama series follows “a self-hacking security android who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable ‘clients,’” according to the streamer. “Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe.”
And like some of the actors below, Skarsgård might find that it’s not always easy playing an android on screen. Here are other TV stars with synthetic entries on their filmographies…
Brent Spiner as Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation
Spiner started playing Data, the USS Enterprise’s synthetic second officer, when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987, and he reprised the role recently on Star Trek: Picard.
“[Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry], when I first met him, he was describing the character of Data and what he wanted from Data was that Data would get closer and closer and closer to being human,” Spiner told TrekMovie earlier this year. “And at the end of the day, he’s as close as he can be and still not.”
Tricia Helfer as Number Six in Battlestar Galactica
As this Syfy reboot of the original Battlestar Galactica picked up, the enemy Cylon robots had evolved to be indistinguishable from humans in models like Helfer’s Number Six.
“Cylons aren’t just cold robotic creatures like a Terminator,” Helfer explained to reporters in 2009. “It’s not your typical robot. It’s much more like Blade Runner and the Replicants and things like that. So they have a lot more emotion, and they’re a lot more human.”
Summer Glau as Cameron in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
For this Fox spinoff of the Terminator film series, Glau played a cyborg sent back in time to protect John Connor (Thomas Dekker).
“I went in and told [creator] Josh [Friedman], ‘I don’t know, I have played such vulnerable and emotional characters up until now. That’s what I’m comfortable with. I don’t know how I’m going to play a robot and make people care about her, and for me as an actress to connect to her,’” Glau recalled to The A.V. Club in 2008. “The writers as a team helped me decide who she is and the fine line between the mystery of how much she really feels and how much she is just a Terminator.”
Michael Ealy as Dorian in Almost Human
In this futuristic Fox procedural, Ealy played Dorian, the android partner of the human Detective John Kennex (Karl Urban).
“Giving yourself over to the fine line of a human-like droid means that sometimes you make choices that don’t make you feel good, as an actor, and you have to learn to embrace that,” Ealy observed in a 2013 interview with Collider. “I have done some takes where I thought, ‘That was bad acting,’ but then you see it and you’re like, ‘That was Dorian,’ because it’s not natural. I have to embrace that awkward feeling about the character.”
Gemma Chan as Anita in Humans
Chan revealed to The New York Times in 2015 that she went to “synth school” in her preparation to play Anita, an android servant working for a London family, in this British series that was aired stateside on AMC.
“We tried to come up with a universal physical language that all synths share,” she added. “What this boils down to is that, ultimately, machines run on battery power, and every move has to be specific and economic and with a grace, eliminating all the little extras. Perfect steps, very precise, nothing very robotic, but something other than human. We decided that with the synths, their eyes would move first, then their heads and bodies. I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t blink too much.”
Thandiwe Newton as Maeve Millay in Westworld
As one of the robotic “hosts” of this HBO drama, Newton’s Maeve thought she was a madam in a Western town… but eventually realized she was programmed that way.
“What they wanted more than anything was for us to be human, but to be minimal with what we do so that everything that we do is deliberate,” Newton told Vulture in 2016, recalling getting into a host’s mindset. “It was like playing a really chilled-out, focused, well-adjusted person. It would be like me after an amazing meditation session. They don’t have 10 thoughts going on at once. There’s none of the static in their heads that we have.”
Abubakar Salim and Amanda Collin as Father and Mother in Raised by Wolves
Like Chan of Humans, Salim and Collin developed the physicality of their robotic characters, conferring with executive producer Ridley Scott as they prepared to play androids protecting the human children populating an extraterrestrial world in this Max series.
“We just tried out a bunch of stuff,” Collin told Entertainment Weekly in 2022. “You start with nothing, and then you’re like, ‘How do we walk? Do you walk normally?’ I remember I also have this tendency [to stick out] my very long neck, and I was like, ‘Oh, robots don’t have a giraffe neck like that.’ So we worked a lot on posture and little things here and there.”
Added Salim, “There is something quite almost ethereal about it all. I think it was either the first day or the second day doing a walk and then Ridley telling me, ‘Don’t walk like that.’ I was like, ‘Oh, okay, cool. Robots don’t walk that way.’ We were finding our own answers, even to our own questions that we were discovering.”
Paul Bettany as Vision in WandaVision
Bettany’s time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe began with a voice role as the AI assistant J.A.R.V.I.S. in the 2008 film Iron Man. J.A.R.V.I.S. eventually gained physical form and became Vision, a character who made a return in this Disney+ series.
“I have loved this entire journey from the very first moment that Jon Favreau rang me up and said, ‘Hey, I [need] somebody with no personality to play a robot. Would you do it?’” Bettany quipped in a 2021 interview with Screen Rant. “ I have had an absolute riot, and this has been the absolute pinnacle of it.”
Laura Birn as Eto Demerzel in Foundation
In Apple TV+’s space epic, Birn plays Eto Demerzel, an android who has advised the Cleonic Dynasty for centuries.
“What I love about her is the complexity between her programming and herself,” Birn told Screen Rant in 2021. “She was programmed to do certain things and to obey the rules of the Cleons, and she cannot break her programming, her protocols, she needs to obey that. But at the same time, she is a robot who’s lived for more than 20,000 years, so she’s learned a lot, she’s seen a lot. She has her programming, but everything else that she is… do we call that a soul? Or a character? What do we call that? … That contradiction is so compelling, and as an actor, it’s like a gift when you get to search that kind of character.”
