How Christian Slater Went From Bad Boy to Good Dad

On a July morning, the actor Christian Slater sat on a bench at the Long Beach marina, grimacing in the California sunshine. Slater 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, which premiered in 2006. (“Dexter: New Blood” debuted in 2021; “Dexter: Resurrection” will air next year.) Premiering Friday on Paramount+, “Original Sin,” set mostly in the early 1990s, describes the early career of Dexter Morgan, a forensic analyst in Miami who offs serial killers that the 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 résumé includes several killers, some accidental and some absolutely psycho. In the late 1980s and 1990s, he specialized 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 of 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 onto 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.”