So here is the news, here is the big reveal: Christian Slater is no longer Christian Slater. He has been replaced by an affable fellow, also named Christian Slater, who smiles and listens and makes sure to get enough sleep and always goes to his meetings. He is someone who makes Good Choices now after many documented years of making bad ones, someone who has decided that any remaining darkness in his soul can be played out through his characters onscreen—someone who at age 47 is delighted, but mostly relieved, to be alive to witness the quiet but pointy peak of his long career. It's wonderful news, really. It's great to make good choices!

I want to be clear that I am very happy for Christian Slater. What a delightful two days we spent together. We shared French fries and even ketchup and developed our own private jokes. But happy as I am for him, I am also absolutely gutted over the experience. Christian Slater, the rebel of my youth, the man who sparked anarchy in my virgin heart, has turned out to be a really nice, gentle, responsible adult, and I couldn't be more disappointed.

By the time Mr. Robot debuted last summer, Christian Slater had endured such a formidable string of TV failures (on the heels of an even longer string of movie failures) that the always subtle New York Post dubbed him a "show killer." There was little reason to hope that a show on the USA Network, a channel I've only ever watched on JetBlue when the E! channel wasn't working, would end the streak. Instead, Mr. Robot, a smart and moody thriller—a little bit Kubrick, a little bit Matrix—about a 28-year-old hacker named Elliot who tries to erase global debt by crashing the financial system, turned out to be the most original new show of the year. It wasn't just that it tapped into the very current fury over wealth distribution and privacy paranoia, but with its dark, fixed, motionless shots, it felt eerily like the show is staring back at you. And then there was Christian Slater in a title role, a logical extension of the persona he created in Heathers and Pump Up the Volume: dangerous and alive and a little/a lot sinister. A true Christian Slater role.

The show's first big twist was that Mr. Robot is Elliot's dad. (Sorry, but you've had a year.) The next was that his dad is dead and that Mr. Robot is a figment of Elliot's imagination (ibid). As good as the show is, evidently some people saw these twists coming. But I wasn't one of them. I've tried to figure out why, and what I've come up with is that the idea of Christian Slater being old enough to have an adult son was—still is—unfathomable to me.

From his Heathers debut, he was drawing comparisons to Jack Nicholson (the bubbling menace, the eyebrows, the hairline) and pretty soon he was being accused of outright trying to be Jack Nicholson. But in fact, the first actor Christian Slater ever tried to copy was Yul Brynner. Slater was just a boy, living in Hell's Kitchen with his mother, and she was dating a theater prop master who took Christian to the theater with him every night. Christian thought he had the best seat in the house: in the wings just off-stage. Every night he'd watch Yul Brynner die in The King and I, every night he'd watch his hand drop—"every night at the exact same moment"—and that just sort of stayed with him. Years later, when he performed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on stage in London (guess which role he played), he stole that. "The greatest artists are the most inspired thieves," he quotes, but neither of us can remember who said that.

In 1980, when he was nine, he joined a traveling revival of The Music Man. He was always accompanied by a family member or family friend, but maybe his chaperones weren't so on the ball, because at the same time he first began to drink. That's right: Christian Slater was nine fucking years old when he had his first drink.

He had his first love scene in 1986's The Name of the Rose, with Sean Connery. He also had an off-screen love scene (better known just as sexual intercourse) with his-costar—not Sean Connery; a Chilean actress named Valentina—when he was 16, which he confirmed with wiggly raised eyebrows during an interview many years ago. Pump Up the Volume was the first script he was sent following Heathers, and the Jack Nicholson comparisons continued, giving him a useful role model for the life he was living: a bacchanalia of intercourse with thousands of women at once (this from my imagination) and smoking that never led to cancer. He reached his real Christian Slater peak between 1993 and 1996: a lovesick loser hero in True Romance, which put him on the map as an adult actor; and a brief, ill-fitting, high-grossing stint as an action star in John Woo's Broken Arrow.

Early in 1997, though, he was arrested for assaulting his then-girlfriend and a police officer, all while under the influence of drugs and alcohol; he checked into rehab, followed by three months in jail. As soon as he got out, he had to do the press for Very Bad Things, a movie about a bachelor party gone so off the rails that a sex worker accidentally gets killed by Jon Favreau. Christian Slater plays the Christian Slater character in the movie—slick, cunning, trying to Machiavelli his way out of trouble—and none of the beat reporters at the junket can resist trying to connect the dots. You can go back now and read the clips, though they will make you very uncomfortable—"cringe-worthy stuff, agony," he calls it now: all these jocular questions about jail and Christian is mortified. Jail is serious, he keeps saying. It's horrible. I don't even want to think about it, much less talk about it publicly. Can we please talk about the movie? Not long after, his career stalled. He did a few direct-to-video movies and a lot of things you've never heard of. He laid low for a while.

His press clips from this period started to take on a different tenor. He was no longer achingly honest or achingly vindictive or achingly personal in interviews. He became someone who is so disarmingly grateful to be working and getting interviewed for it that it's almost disconcerting. He gave long lists of names of his costars and directors, saying how great they are when really what you're asking about is the drama. He was cooperative and eager and nice.

"It's more a testament to just being honest with yourself about where you're at," he says. "It's like, we've tried it as many times as it takes your way, and eventually, hopefully, if you're lucky and fortunate enough, you get to the point where it's like, okay, my way—it's not helping me, it's not helping anybody around me, it's not really creating any happiness for anybody else in anybody's world. So am I going to be humble enough to admit defeat and try a different way?"