Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

In Conversation

Alex Lawther – actor

Charlie Brooker – co-writer and executive producer

William Bridges – co-writer

Annabel Jones – executive producer

Lucy Dyke – producer

James Watkins – director

Jina Jay – series casting director

Jerome Flynn – actor

Small-town teenager Kenny is mortified to discover that mysterious online hackers have used his laptop’s webcam to film him masturbating to porn. In order to prevent the footage being made public, Kenny finds himself blackmailed into carrying out a series of seemingly random tasks, alongside the equally hamstrung businessman Hector.

Alex Lawther (actor):My Black Mirror experience started with the Prime Minister fucking a pig and ended with me playing a paedophile. When I was still living at home, about 16 years old, my parents said there was this new “Mirror thing” on television. It was The National Anthem , so that made for an incredibly awkward experience! I’d never seen anything so outrageous and yet so intelligent on TV. I became a big Black Mirror fan. Then an audition became available for a scrawny kid who gets embroiled in a blackmail…

Charlie Brooker: Shut Up and Dance reminded me of The National Anthem in a way. There’s a seediness to it. A weird, British, colloquial nasty humour. We always say we’ve gone from San Junipero to wanking in Hounslow. Polar opposites, tonally. But that gritty British feeling felt important to have in this first Netflix season, partly to reassure people who’d watched the Channel 4 series: “Look, we’re still this nasty British show with concrete and piss in it.”

For quite a while it was set in America, partly because we were hung up on the fact it’s easier for Kenny to have a gun if it’s in America – but actually it makes the gun more frightening and unusual when it’s in Britain. And initially, the idea was more Reservoir Dogs : a bunch of people who’ve been brought together to rob a bank. And then you realise they don’t actually know each other and they’re all being blackmailed to do it for different reasons that they don’t know.

Shut Up and Dance marked the Black Mirror co-writing debut of William Bridges, a relative newcomer to TV.

William Bridges (co-writer):I credit Charlie and Annabel for very much giving me my break in the industry. I hadn’t met them before, and had virtually no credits to my name, but I’d written a spec script for a TV show that had just been sold to a US broadcaster.

Annabel Jones:That script was a really well-written pilot. You could see there was a shared tone, with well-drawn characters and humour, so Will seemed a good fit for us.

William Bridges:The three ideas I pitched to Charlie and Annabel were shit and none of them stuck, but I think we got on enough for them to trust that my spec script wasn’t a fluke. A few days later, they sent me one of Charlie’s own ideas to flesh out: an embryonic version of Shut Up and Dance .

The treatment was very different from the finished episode. Set in America, it ended with Kenny in the desert as a hundred cop cars appeared over the horizon gunning for him. In this version, Kenny was just a sweet American teenager who got blackmailed into robbing a convenience store after wanking to harmless porn. Fleshing it out proved really tough because whenever the stakes got high enough for Kenny to face serious consequences, like jail time, it was unbelievable to have him rob a bank. Nine times out of 10, embarrassment at your peers seeing your wiener is preferable to spending a good portion of your life incarcerated.

Charlie Brooker:We couldn’t work out why Kenny was being punished like this, when he’d just been wanking to porn. So, what if we made him the villain, then? And it finally made sense.

Lucy Dyke (producer):James Watkins had proven his directorial ability with films like 2008’s Eden Lake and 2012’s The Woman in Black , by creating tension and unease, this sense of dread.

Charlie Brooker:The final five minutes of Eden Lake is one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen.

Lucy Dyke:James completely understood how to take a script that felt quite small and simple and build it into something cinematic. The film had to rely on the building tension of the story-telling and the performances of the two lead actors.

James Watkins (director):At the time, I’d never done any television. Charlie, Annabel and I had a cup of tea and chatted through the script. We relocated it to the UK, because I’m not sure there was a reason for it to be in America. It came together incredibly quickly, the fastest thing I’ve ever done, which was part of the attraction. I wanted to explore the world of television and shooting on that kind of schedule. Also, the material really lent itself to that gun-and-run approach.

It’s always grim and grey in the UK in February when we shot, so we particularly pushed that gun-metal palette. In the production office, I saw all these art department pictures of glamorous blue skies, as they prepped Nosedive and San Junipero . So I thought, “Right, we’re gonna go the other way. We’ll embrace being the ugly cousin.”

The key choice was the casting of Alex. We saw quite a few actors, but he had such an understated truth. Even though he gets quite manic in the episode, he had this interesting sympathy about him.

Jina Jay (series casting director):Alex Lawther read with James and nailed the heart of the role. He’s such a beautiful young actor, who’s gifted with the ability to convey a secretive interior and make an audience root for this troubled character.

Annabel Jones:So much of the film rested with Alex and his performance – and him taking the role in the first place. I mean, a lot of people would have been put off taking that role.

Charlie Brooker:I know! However many pages into the script, he’s pulling his pants down and wanking. It’s not exactly saving an orphanage, is it?

Alex Lawther:I’d done little bits in film and theatre. My agent loves Black Mirror , so we were both excited. For my audition tape, I did one scene with Kenny delivering the cake to Hector’s room, and also Kenny breaking down in the car – with no knowledge of what was going on around those scenes! Further along in the audition process, I read the script, and thought, “Come on Kenny, just turn yourself in – don’t rob a bank or kill someone, it’s not that big of a deal!” And then I thought, “Oh God!” and felt very unnerved. How brilliant that they’d made me sympathise with a paedophile for so long. And the complexity of that, because he’s so young…