This week on The Awards Tour Podcast, our host Jacqueline Coley chats with Alexander Skarsgård about the acclaimed Apple TV sci-fi comedy Murderbot, which debuted its first season in May of 2025 to a Certified Fresh 95% on the Tomatometer. Skarsgård talks about how the character upended his expectations of what the role would be and how he and creators Chris and Paul Weitz worked tirelessly to tweak the tone of the show’s pivotal voiceover. He also explains how he chooses his roles and how that process has led to an eclectic filmography that includes everything from True Blood and The Diary of a Teenage Girl to Succession, The Northman, and Pillion.
Jacqueline Coley for Rotten Tomatoes: When you think about your choices as an actor, what is the thing that inspires you to say, ‘This is the next right thing for me?’ Is it instinctual? Is it that you send it to peers? How do you know, because there does seem to be a real sort of careful magic to it that has gotten you this really varied filmography from Zoolander forward.
Alexander Skarsgård: I just send everything to my dad and I ask him what I should do.
RT: Shut up. Are you serious?
Skarsgård: Yeah. He’s got great taste. As soon as he read Pillion, he was like, ‘You gotta do this, son. A kinky biker BDSM movie.’ Uh, no, I don’t really have a good answer to that question because I don’t really have a strategy. It’s not like a list of movies and boxes I want to tick off. It’s very driven by a gut feeling and instinct or obviously informed probably by where I am at the moment when I read a script, informed by what I’ve done recently. Having spent eight months in the mud playing Amleth in The Northman, I was quite eager to go do something very different, so jumping from that to Succession, which is kind of diametrically opposed to that, was exactly what I needed in that moment.
Murderbot: Season 1 is currently streaming on Apple TV.
