The socio-emotional interaction with robots might become an important part of our future daily lives. However, on the one hand, it is still far from clear which design criteria robots should meet to be capable of adequately expressing affective states and, on the other hand, if humans are capable of interpreting these affective expressions of robots correctly. Most studies on this topic use highly artificial or restricted settings. Our current experimental study, however, investigates how different types of robots are perceived in authentic and complex affective settings in order to examine the importance of salient robot design aspects with regard to affective human-robot interaction. To ensure authenticity and to fully capture the complexity of human-robot interaction, we used different scenes from robot movies. The scenes showed robots that systematically differed in their anthropomorphic appearance and behavior. Participants rated the robots’ appearance and ability to express and convey basic emotions (fear, sadness, anger, happiness, vs. neutral) in affect-provoking situations. Results showed that the selected movie scenes were suitable for the exploration of affective human-robot perception and interaction. Moreover, the influence of participants’ trait emotional intelligence will be discussed. Implications for further research as well as for applied issues will be outlined.