Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

I really liked working with our costume designer Guy Speranza to find the right clothes for Kenny, in a way I’d paid less attention to in the past when taking roles. There was a real balance between finding clothes that were sort of sad and lonely, and someone hiding their body, but at the same time without screaming, “Oh, that’s a man in a paedophile coat.”

One apparently innocuous early scene, which plays very differently on second viewing, sees Kenny being nice to a little girl in the café.

Charlie Brooker:The original idea was that you think he’s flirting with the mum, just as a red herring. The moment felt a bit risky, and I was worried that people would guess the twist. I guess it’s like being a magician where you know the secret of the trick.

Alex Lawther:That was very creepy to play, and James was very good at keeping an eye on the balance. It came down to glancing for slightly too long, but not so long as to give the game away on first watch.

James Watkins:Alex was very attuned as an actor to his own journey, so I didn’t have to police it in an insane way. Plus, if you’re wary enough, you can always give yourself a couple of different colours to choose between in the edit.

Annabel Jones:We had problems casting the young girl for the café. Our producer Lucy was struggling to find any parents who were happy for their daughter to do it. She asked James whether his daughters would do it. James said, “Absolutely not!”, so I got my own daughter to do it. It’s what any proud mum would do.

Alex Lawther:We talked about playing it like Kenny was just a totally normal, nice, useless guy, and letting the twist tell itself. Because from Kenny’s perspective, he’s in so much denial about his sexuality that, to all intents and purposes, it’s all very repressed.

So I decided to play it as though Kenny hasn’t done anything wrong. I left the twist completely out of my mind. When I was playing him, there was always the feeling of being really uncomfortable in one’s own skin. There was a squirmy feeling in his stomach, like he had an upset tummy. And that was great, because that fitted both with him being a teenager and him hiding something dark and upsetting.

Even if he wasn’t a paedophile, being filmed watching porn would be social suicide for Kenny in a way. When you’re in your late teens and you’re already not a particularly popular chap, it could ruin your life socially and might seem like a sort of death. I could imagine people going to extreme lengths to keep that information away from Facebook and the online world. It would really just seem like the end of everything.

I can’t remember whose idea it was for me to smell my fingers in the bathroom but it’s really fucking weird. I bumped into Charlie recently and he said, “Why did you do that? That was so weird, Alex!” And I tried to blame it on James.

James Watkins:That’s probably Alex being diffident! I would imagine that was a choice he made that I embraced. It was an odd-but-right choice – something that you wouldn’t necessarily write, because you wouldn’t think about it. Because an actor’s very in the moment, they can bring something else to the party. To be fair, I think Charlie embraced it in the edit too. I don’t think he can entirely disavow himself of that choice!

Annabel Jones:It wasn’t in the script. Was it in the script? I remember us having a conversation about that moment. It just felt so weirdly unguarded and odd, that we left it in.

Charlie Brooker:Everyone’s passing the buck on this one! I might pass the buck to Will. I don’t think it was me.

William Bridges:I know who’s responsible, but I think it’s more fun to keep it a mystery. It’s clearly a moment anyone who’s ever been a teenage boy relates to, whether they admit it in a published book or not.

Once Kenny’s blackmailers have flung him into the urban rat’s maze, he drives frantically around town with middle-aged Hector, played by Jerome Flynn.

Charlie Brooker:The story originally played out over a bigger time span, and we kept cutting it back. So Kenny almost has to do that thing from the Dirty Harry movies, where he’s running across town to answer the ringing phone.

Alex Lawther:Jerome and I spent a little time in rehearsing, but only met briefly. Then I was thrown into a two-hander in that car. We had quite a nice time in the end, but at first we were two reserved English people sitting in a car together, trying to avoid talking about the uncomfortable subject of the piece we were playing! Jerome’s very laidback – he does meditation and likes being outdoors. It was funny to see him playing someone so different from the life I imagined he led.

Jerome Flynn (actor):Alex played Kenny so perfectly. The fact we didn’t get time beforehand to socialise was good, because it felt very real, what we were going through with our characters.

Alex Lawther:The challenge was that it was a thriller in genre, with escalating tension, so I had to keep a gauge on where that dial was. You didn’t want to show all your cards too quickly, because things just get worse and worse. But ultimately it’s down to James and his editor for sustaining that tension. It could just be relentless, but there’s an ebb and flow that comes down to the edit.

James Watkins:I’d just made an action film, so was able to shoot that fast and get the coverage we needed to energise it. I’ve worked with the editor Jon Harris on everything I’ve done. He’s cut Danny Boyle’s movies, so it wasn’t shot like television. I wanted it accelerated, even through the comedic stuff. It was really good fun, but very intense across 15 days.

Jerome Flynn:The stuff in the car was really thrilling. As an actor, you’re not actually driving, you’re being towed, and so to compensate for that, I found myself hyperventilating, to the point where I almost fainted. It was very strange, and I don’t know why I did that! Maybe I would’ve hyperventilated anyway, due to the tension of the situation.

Alex Lawther:Jerome was hyperventilating all the time! We kept having to cut because he couldn’t breathe. Which was quite sweet, but frustrating for him – I think he was getting a little annoyed at himself.

Jerome Flynn:I did actually get in a bit of trouble and lost my head a bit, because I really got dizzy. It was stupid, because I’d have been much better with a clear head! But I was pleased with how the panic came across onscreen.

Alex Lawther:There was actually hyperventilation on both our parts – we were both just passing out in the car every five minutes. I don’t think that counts as ‘method’, it’s more sort of Heavy Breathing Acting! You’d finish the day and feel quite sick and woozy, because you’d not taken a proper full breath all day.

James Watkins:Hector was a very difficult performance: he walks a line between being a total shit and a fallible human being. Jerome did a fantastic job, because it could so easily veer into caricature. At very end, there’s a real movie star moment when it’s all come out in the wash with Hector’s wife and everything’s about to go to Hell. Those final close-ups on him, as the realisation dawns, the layers of emotion that flicker over his face… he’s doing a lot with a little. He had a real understanding of who that character was.