A starlet is hunted by the paparazzi. Two men adrift in space send their consciousnesses back to Earth to be with their families. A woman in 1979 Yorkshire goes on a killing spree.
What connects these disparate stories? Turns out, it’s the latest season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror.
On the go since 2011 – it originally started life as a Channel 4 show – Black Mirror is now a Netflix behemoth capable of pulling some serious star power. This season alone features performances from Salma Hayek, Michael Cera, Aaron Paul and Annie Murphy, requiring actors to get creative in their pursuit of a coveted role.
“I was a massive fan of the show, as everyone should be. And so I found out somebody leaked that there was going to be a season six,” Danny Ramirez (who plays photographer Hector in Mazey Day) says. “I basically just tweeted, ‘I would do an episode of Black Mirror for free,’ and I thought I sent it out into the abyss.”
A few days later, his tweet was seen by Netflix. “I was stepping out [onto] Top Gun’s London premiere; onto the red carpet. And my manager basically whispered, ‘Hey, you got a Black Mirror episode. And it’s about paparazzi,’ and she sent me out onto the red carpet and the flashes of light bulbs.”
The people who get roles are aware of how lucky they are. “There’s a combination of Black Mirror being like, an already established thing, [so] people want to do it, so it’s not hard to get good people,” Paapa Essiedu says. “And people are willing to go the extra mile to make it work.”
It helps when you have good castmates to bounce off, of course – and Essiedu has just that with his co-star Anjana Vasan, who plays meek shopgirl Nida to his demon character, Gaap. During the episode, Nida is visited by Gaap, who tells her she has to commit three murders in three days, or the apocalypse will happen. The twist? It’s a comedy.
“There is something ridiculous and funny about the premise,” says Vasan, who recently starred in A Streetcar Named Desire in the West End. “I just thought there was something really clever about Bisha [K. Ali] and Charlie’s writing that it was… very natural and believable.
“I feel like we have an easy chemistry. We get on and we’re quite silly in real life. So that translates to our dynamic on screen. I was trying hard not to like laugh most of the time.”
One thing that’s new this season is that many of the show’s episodes – such as Demon 79 and Mazey Day – are set in a version of the past. As far as Demon 79 went, it involved wearing a lot of shades of brown (as Vasan puts it, “How many shades of brown were there?”); in the case of Mazey Day, it involved revisiting a time when tabloid newspapers reigned supreme and paparazzi stalked celebrities in search of scoops.
“I think it’s I always find it really interesting to play characters that I guess are the opposite of your point of view,” Zazie Beetz says: her character, Bo, is a paparazzo who spends most of the episode trying to find missing star Mazey Day.
For an actor, it’s perhaps not the easiest role to play, but to research, she watched documentaries especially 2010’s Smash His Camera, about celebrity photographer Ron Galella.
“He had such an infectious personality. You really felt… like, ‘Oh, you love this. This is like your art and your craft,’” she says. “It gave me perspective around the idea of the contracts between celebrities and paparazzi and how we keep each other afloat with each other’s work and all the implications around that.”
Inevitably, talk turns to Brooker, the mastermind behind the show – who popped up on the show’s many sets occasionally to oversee proceedings.
“I thought he was just like a supercomputer,” Ramirez says admiringly. “From season one to season six every single [episode] has such a unique perspective. It’s the hyper specificity, folded with the comments on humanity… some people live their whole lives trying to find like one guy, one idea, that deals with these topics in such a way.
“He’s been throwing out banger after banger after banger. It’s just like, he’s so fluent in it. He’s brilliant.”
Though some of this season’s episodes swerve as far away from traditional Black Mirror fare as possible, everybody I spoke to insisted that Brooker, while pivoting away from tech dystopias, has stayed true to the spirit of the show.
“The core of the show is really just an exploration of humanity and our true selves and our true fears and our flaws, and where we’re fallible,” Beetz says. “So I think in that way, yeah, I do believe that it adheres to what the show’s trying to do: [show] our shadow selves, our black mirror.”
For Beetz, Mazey Day’s focus on the exploitation of celebrity and its critique of the media is what makes the show stand out – something that Industry star Myha’la Herrold, who plays Pia in the episode Loch Henry, agrees with.
Though tonally different to Mazey Day, Loch Henry also revolves around what happens when the search for a story goes wrong; in this case, two students making a documentary stumble onto some unwelcome truths that are then sensationalised in the press.
“I think it absolutely is a critique. Charlie is really good at that. It’s called Black Mirror for a reason,” she says. “People want to consume this type of art. So that’s why people make it.”
“I think the point that Charlie is making in the episode is the fact that we are on a road with our algorithmic streaming,” her co-star Samuel Blenkin (who plays her boyfriend, Davis) says.
“We’re being led down paths that I don’t think we understand. I love the fact that there’s not so much technology in our episode.”
Instead, for him, it’s an examination of “the way that we consume media,” and how the public’s hunger for stories inspires content creators to take more and more risks: as he puts it, “what price do we pay for commercialising someone else’s trauma?”
So viewers should put away their mobile phones and settle in, because this season is just as dark and insightful as its predecessors.
“It’s still the twisted mind of Charlie,” Herrold says. “And just because it doesn’t have tech in it doesn’t mean it’s not interrogating the things that are relevant to us now, instead of what might be relevant to us in five or ten years. It’s what’s relevant to us right now.”
