David Dastmalchian opens up about his character in Murderbot: grief, gore and the machine behind Gurathin

Few actors have carved a niche as unmistakable as David Dastmalchian. Known for playing haunted men, outcasts and monsters with a raw, unnerving intimacy, he has become a recurring presence in the shadows, not as a cliché, but as someone who lives there, who understands them.

In Murderbot, Apple TV+’s strange and tender blend of sci-fi, drama and satire, he plays Gurathin, a prickly, enhanced human who mistrusts the titular robot and refuses to let peace come easy. But what might have been just another antagonistic role becomes, through David Dastmalchian’s performance, something deeper: a vessel for his own grief, history, and healing.

Beneath the sarcasm and suspicion, Gurathin vibrates with trauma. And so does David Dastmalchian. In a recent interview, he spoke with rare honesty about how this character brought him face to face with his past, not in metaphor, but in performance. The result is one of the most intimate roles of his career. A mix of human and machine, yes, but one that bleeds in all the ways that matter.

Gurathin speaks for David Dastmalchian

For most of Murderbot’s first episodes, Gurathin seems like the designated skeptic, someone programmed to push back, probe flaws, and remind the others that trusting a rogue SecUnit with a violent past is, frankly, a bad idea. It’s easy to frame him as an antagonist, but as David Dastmalchian puts it, Gurathin is right. The unit is malfunctioning. The danger is real. And more than one truth can exist at the same time.

This refusal to flatten things into binaries is part of what drew him to the character. Gurathin, he says, is a mirror. Not just for the audience, but for the actor himself.

“I often go through the world just on the aggressiveness of the attack, looking for what’s wrong with things,” he admits. “Sometimes, when you think about Dr. Mensah’s approach — like, ‘Let’s sit back, let’s talk about this’ — Gurathin’s like, ‘F*** that. We don’t need to talk about anything.’”

That rawness came to a head in Murderbot episode 7. Without revealing the plot, it marks a turning point for Gurathin, a moment where the character’s past surfaces, and the performance stops being performance. For David Dastmalchian, that scene was one of the hardest of his entire career. On that day, he walked onto set carrying twenty-two years of sobriety, mental health work, and deeply personal history. The words in the script weren’t just lines. They were his.

He credits the cast and crew, particularly director Roseanne Liang, with giving him a safe space to go there.

“I collapsed in the arms of my castmates,” he recalls. “They lifted me up so much that day.”

When he went home, he logged into an online support group and tried to process what had just happened. What lingered wasn’t just exhaustion. It was pride. That he had shown up. That he had said the lines. That he had survived it.

There are moments in Murderbot when Gurathin stops feeling like a sci-fi archetype and starts feeling eerily real, angry, hurt, brittle, trying not to break. Those moments work because Gurathin isn’t only speaking for himself. He is speaking for David. And David let him.

“I like my humans bloody and complicated”

David Dastmalchian plays men who have been broken in ways they don’t always know how to articulate. Men with jagged edges, thick defenses, and a deep, often unspoken ache for connection. In that sense, Gurathin belongs to a long lineage. But what makes him different, and what makes Murderbot such a fitting home for Dastmalchian’s sensibility, is the space it gives for contradiction.

“I like my humans bloody and complicated,” he says, and it shows.

Whether he’s writing comic books about monstrous gorgons or performing as a 1970s horror host, his stories reject simplicity and linger in discomfort. They invite empathy without demanding redemption. That’s what Gurathin does too. He doesn’t ask to be liked, only understood.

David Dastmalchian talks about his evolving toolkit for dealing with roles like this, ones that demand emotional intensity and emotional honesty. Sometimes it’s about protecting the body, remembering that even fake violence leaves real traces. Sometimes it’s about recognizing when a role starts to echo too much. But he listens to those echoes.

As he says,

“There’s stuff physically as you progress through this season — the threat of danger, real danger, and violence happens in really intense ways. So, there are things that my body and my voice and my person got the opportunity to experience. Even though I know it’s all make-believe… your body didn’t know that that didn’t really happen.”

That tension between knowing and feeling, between play and truth, runs through all of his work. It gives his performances their edge. And it’s what makes Gurathin, for all his hostility and bluntness, one of the most affecting characters in Murderbot.

He’s not written to be loved. But the more he resists vulnerability, the more visible his wounds become. And David Dastmalchian, with his particular gift for making pain feel articulate, never looks away.

Monsters know me

There’s a reason David Dastmalchian keeps getting cast as strange men, haunted men, figures who seem one step removed from reality. It isn’t because he leans into the monstrous. His version of “creepy” trembles with memory. With recognition. Monsters, for him, carry something real. Fear. Addiction. Isolation. A long shadow of personal truth.

That thread runs through his film work and deepens in the stories he creates. His comic series Count Crowley is more than a love letter to vintage horror. It’s a coded memoir. Jerri, the reluctant monster hunter and recovering alcoholic at its center, carries much of David Dastmalchian’s own struggle. The weight of shame. The need for control. The quiet fight to stay present. She’s furious and flawed and still trying. That’s the kind of character he understands best.

Even Dr. Fearless, his horror host persona, wears the same mark. He’s theatrical and strange, but never hollow. The hosting is a mask, but the hand beneath it still shakes. In Gurathin, that instinct hardens into something sharper. A character who would rather be disliked than exposed.

The pain in Murderbot never screams. It pulls inward. Gurathin doesn’t crack, he calcifies. The horror comes not from violence, but from silence. And silence, for David Dastmalchian, is never empty.

Dr. Fearless will host you now

David Dastmalchian has a deep love for the theatrical side of horror. Not just the dread, but the ritual. That’s where Dr. Fearless was born. A horror host in the tradition of Svengoolie and Joe Bob Briggs, equal parts homage and evolution. The character has lived in sketches and specials for years, but now he’s stepping into focus. A Holiday of Horrors event with the Boulet Brothers is just the beginning.

What Dastmalchian dreams of is something ongoing. Something weekly. Live broadcasts, monster movies, monologues and makeup. A haunted appointment with comfort at its core.

It’s more than aesthetic. Horror hosting is another form of storytelling. Another invitation to face the dark together. That desire runs through his entire creative life. He wants to share the stories that saved him. To build spaces where monstrosity and humanity sit side by side, without shame.

He imagines a future where things slow down. Where Friday nights are spent in character, talking directly to the weirdos who tune in. The dream hasn’t fully taken form. But the spirit of it already lives in everything he does. Whether it’s Gurathin or a Gorgon, a werewolf or a VHS tape, he is already hosting. We’re already watching.

Murderbot was fate

There’s a quiet inevitability to David Dastmalchian landing in Murderbot. Not because he fits the world, but because the world fits him. Martha Wells’ work doesn’t deal in easy answers. It holds pain and tenderness in the same frame. It asks how we survive in systems that were never meant to protect us. These are the questions Dastmalchian has circled his whole life.

Gurathin is a man altered by tech, but broken by people. He’s logical and bitter and lonely in ways he won’t name. He could have been played as cold. Dastmalchian lets him fracture instead. Not to shatter, but to show where the pressure lives. Where the hurt is buried. Where the softness still exists under the armor.

This role mattered. Not because it was big. Because it was honest. The pain was real. The recognition was real. And Gurathin spoke not from invention, but from memory.

Murderbot is full of machines. Some deadly. Some glitching. Some learning. Gurathin is different. He is already human. Not despite the damage. Because of it.

The man behind the mask in Murderbot

To talk about David Dastmalchian is to talk about performance as survival. Not in the superficial sense, but in the way someone learns to wear a persona well enough to function. Gurathin doesn’t perform because he wants to but because the alternative is collapse. That’s what makes his presence in Murderbot so compelling. In a story about code and control, he brings something frayed and aching and real.

David Dastmalchian has spent years creating strange spaces where pain and beauty meet. What Murderbot gave him was room to tell the truth. All of it. The ghosts, the fear, the humor, the love.

Gurathin doesn’t ask to be understood. But thanks to Dastmalchian, he is.