On a July morning, actor Christian Slater sat on a bench at the Long Beach marina, grimacing in the California sunshine. He sighed, he scowled, he groaned. He looked like a man facing some terrible moral quandary. Or like a man with severe indigestion.
Slater, 55, was filming a scene for Dexter: Original Sin, the latest brand extension of the florid Showtime serial killer series that premiered in 2006. (Dexter: New Blood debuted in 2021; Dexter: Resurrection will air next year.)
Dexter (Patrick Gibson, right) and his dad Harry (Christian Slater) in Dexter: Original Sin.Credit: Paramount+
Original Sin, which premiered on Paramount+ on December 13, is set mostly in the early 1990s and describes the early career of Dexter Morgan, a forensic analyst in Miami who offs serial killers police can’t corral. It features the same central characters as the original show, though they are now played by different, younger actors, Slater among them.
That Slater should join the Dexter universe is no surprise. His resume includes several killers, some accidental and some absolutely psycho. In the late 1980s and 1990s, he specialised in dark matter, playing anarchic, irresistible characters in movies like Heathers (directed by Michael Lehmann, a producing director of Original Sin), True Romance and Pump Up the Volume.
Back then, Slater didn’t know how to separate himself from his characters. “I didn’t have an identity enough of my own to really be able to separate or differentiate between the two,” he said. “I was latching on to any sort of personality that I could find.” So that darkness impinged on his personal life, too. There were arrests on charges of assault, drunken driving, attempting to board a flight with a gun in his luggage. Interview magazine once called him “the last analog bad boy”.
But Slater is now 19 years sober, and in the past decade he has re-emerged as a trusted television actor. (He is even off nicotine, more recently, after meeting with a hypnotist that comedian John Mulaney uses.) Sometimes, as in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, he has played gently parodic versions of himself. In Mr. Robot, Dr. Death and now Original Sin, he has embraced a new type – the wiser, older mentor encountering a new generation of chaos agents. Moral anguish looks good on him.
Slater doesn’t play a killer in Original Sin. He co-stars as Harry Morgan, a veteran cop who’s trying to keep his son’s homicidal urges in check. That Slater has morphed from bad boy to good dad, in his work at the very least, is a redemption arc years in the making. Slater sells it.
“It takes a little while to get the ship to turn,” he said meditatively. (Christian Slater, meditative? I know!) “As far as the business perceiving you in that way, it just takes time.”
Slater didn’t watch Dexter when it first aired. He discovered it a few years later and felt that blend of pleasure and envy that’s particular to many actors. In the original, Harry was played by James Remar, a character actor who also has a way with psychopaths. Remar and Slater don’t look much alike. But there’s an impulsivity to both of them, an unpredictability that’s especially interesting when it’s held in check.
