Irresistible Risk

Three years ago, when Christian Slater was first approached about playing the title role in a new series called Mr. Robot, he wasn’t quite with the program.

“i thought, ‘huh? are there going to be cables and wires coming out of me?’” he says. “it was hard to get a sense of the show from the title.”

The hit USA Network series turned out to be a smart, moody, totally original thriller — and Slater’s character is anything but an automaton.

As the leader of a mysterious hacktivist group, he lures a brilliant but disturbed young cybersecurity engineer named Elliot (Rami Malek) to crash the net- work of the world’s largest corporation to bring about financial equality for all. Well, not quite. Spoiler alert: Mr. Robot is actually a figment of Elliot’s fertile imagination.

Slater says that when series creator–executive producer Sam Esmail told him about the plot twist, “My arms shot out, I got so excited. I was afraid the show was going to have a cookie-cutter scenario and stay on the safe side. But it’s taking risks, which makes Mr. Robot very exciting for me to play.”

To do that, Slater brushed up on his own cyber skills. “I love computers and tech, but there were all these acronyms in the script that I had to look up so I could impress Sam with my vast knowledge,” he says.

“When I was a kid, I did this commercial where they asked me beforehand if I could ride a 10-speed bike, and I said, ‘Absolutely!’ even though I had no idea. Well, by the time we started shooting Mr. Robot, all the abbreviations I’d memorized were already outdated. I had to learn a bunch of new stuff.”

The series itself — which taps into the global concern about privacy — couldn’t feel more timely. “Whether it’s Target or Walmart or Sony, hacking has become a fact of life,” Slater says. “Sam had been tracking all of this and watching how the internet and social media can launch a revolution. It took some very insightful thinking to create this show. It’s like he had a crystal ball.”

It’s not just tech thrills that make for compelling viewing. Mr. Robot — which earned six Emmy nominations last year, including Outstanding Drama Series — is built around two very relatable characters, even if one is just imaginary.

“Elliot is lonely and misunderstood,” Slater explains, “and out of that loneliness he creates Mr. Robot, who is an idealized image of his dead father: he’s cocky, mischievous, very seductive and has a heroic quality that Elliot projects onto him.

“I get to portray that guy, but because Sam is interested in different timelines and flashbacks, I get to play the real human being as well. He’s nervous and klutzy. He’s frail and dying. But he truly loves his son and plants these seeds that get downloaded into Elliot’s being.”

In other words, the role is an actor’s dream. So is working with Malek, who won the 2016 Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.

“From the get-go, it was easy to lay the foundation for our characters’ relationship, and it’s been the same ever since,” Slater says. “He’s a fantastic actor who’s really come into his own, and it’s exciting to be a supporting player in that process.”

Slater isn’t coasting on anyone’s coattails. In addition to voice work on three animated shows (FX’s Archer and the Disney Channel’s The Lion Guard and Milo Murphy’s Law), he has two upcoming films, The Public, with Alec Baldwin and Taylor Schilling, and The Wife, with Glenn Close.

So what’s in store for Mr. Robot’s third season? “The one word I’ve been told is disintegration,” he says. “I’ll understand what that means when I see it.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 6, 2017