Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Mackenzie Davies:Gugu I first met in the hotel elevator. We were riding the elevator, ignoring each other, as you do, then I looked in the mirror at Gugu and realized she was my love Kelly! From then on, we just adored each other and I’m so thankful she was my partner throughout this whole experience.

Laurie Borg (producer):Our biggest challenge was creating period America on a tight budget, so the key decision I made was to film most of the interiors in London and most of the exteriors in Cape Town. I knew we could not afford to film in the US, but also knew South Africa could deliver ‘period’ Americana streets and coastlines.

Filming the Tucker’s Bar interiors on a constructed set on a stage in Hayes was an effective way to control the different periods, including the management of extras in period clothing and make-up.

Annabel Jones:On the first day of filming for our new big Netflix Black Mirror series, we shot the interior scenes of the Quagmire. A dodgy club in North London. Naked butts, nipple tassels and pierced bits everywhere. We knew how to spend those Netflix dollars.

Joel Collins:Before we built Tucker’s Bar for real, we built it in 3D. I gave Charlie and Owen a VR headset, so they could walk around the bar and look at the space. In the industry that process is just beginning, so we marched ahead a bit. We were Black Mirror , after all.

Owen Harris:You could walk around this VR bar and say things like, “Can we push the bar back a bit? Can we make the balcony a bit wider?” My overriding memory is feeling a bit sea-sick every time I put it on, so I gave up, but it was incredibly useful and I massively appreciated the effort!

Susie Coulthard (costume designer):San Junipero needed to feel like a simulated world without being too obvious. We discussed only having one outfit for Kelly and Yorkie in 1987, but decided it was better to have a narrative within the wardrobe, as if you could make those choices when accessing the San Junipero system. The wedding dresses, both made from the same fabric but differing 80s styles, suggested you could design your own wedding look within the system.

Tanya Lodge (hair and make-up):I wanted to tell Kelly and Yorkie’s story by giving them a strong look which defined their personality but felt believable for the audience. Kelly’s flamboyant appearance was a collaboration between costume and make-up. The big hair was inspired by style icons of the time such as Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston and Lisa Bonet. Her bold lipstick choice showed her confidence and ease with herself. In contrast, the pared-back look of Yorkie hinted at her innocence and social unease.

Susie Coulthard:Gugu and I kept coming back to a purple suede Versace jacket I had found on Brick Lane. We worked out we needed to razz it up with studs and fringe to make it more Kelly.

‘The bond. The commitment. The boredom. The yearning, the laughter, the love of it. The fucking love. You just cannot know. Everything we sacrificed. The years I gave him, the years he gave me. Did you think to ask? Did it occur to you to ask?’

Mackenzie Davis:I loved the very first Yorkie outfit: the pleated khaki shorts and aqua sweater over a pink polo. It said so much about the character without drawing attention to itself at all – where she came from and what she thought was a nice outfit to reintroduce herself to the world. It still makes me laugh that she could have put together anything for this new self and she chose something that looks like her mum laid it out on her bed, the night before a charity golf tournament! But as Kelly says, it was authentically her, and there’s something so beautiful about this woman choosing to be authentically herself in this moment of unlimited possibility. The thrill of her identity and her queerness is the event, the reason for all of this, not the opportunity to reinvent her exterior self and sell a coolness that would appeal to anyone else.

Susie Coulthard:Mackenzie was super happy to play the transforming geek, which is such a constant in 1980s films. With Yorkie’s glasses, I really wanted the changes to be slight yet period-authentic as she jumped around the years. When she finally enters the system as a full timer, she has no glasses, as San Junipero has become her authentic life. Owen suggested that she takes them off and leaves them on the beach which I think is such a perfect moment.

Mackenzie Davis:I think they nicely undid the ‘transforming geek’ trope by playing with the outfit montage early on. Were they loyal to that trope, Yorkie would have re-entered Tucker’s in slow-mo, modelling the Addicted To Love look, and the whole bar would have gone slack-jawed and silent. Instead they played through all the transformative possibilities in the mirror and Yorkie settles, once again, on a golf-mom look and lets the transformation be self-motivated and internal. Quietly, it’s the most unique, least derivative of all the looks she tried on, which is Susie and Tanya’s genius.

Tanya Lodge:As the two characters travelled through the decades, I kept one look for each period so each year had an identifiable look, using various hair pieces and make up. I particularly enjoyed creating the debauched world of the Quagmire, where we used crazy wigs and really strong make-up styles, letting our imagination run wild.

Annabel Jones:The concept allowed us to do Black Mirror ’s version of time travel. When Yorkie goes searching for Kelly, she looks in lots of different years, so we had a lot of fun changing their costumes, the cars, the style of dancing. Charlie is incredibly specific, right down to the video games and arcade machines for every year. We spent a long time, in post production, looking at archive footage and posters that would help establish these different periods as quickly as possibly – the footage that is playing in the TV shop, the film posters outside Tucker’s, the music….

Gugu Mbatha-Raw:We worked with a dance choreographer and played around with some very specific styles. We looked at the music videos of Janet Jackson. I don’t think they got the rights to her song What Have You Done for Me Lately , but that’s what we originally worked with and shot.