Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Charlie Brooker:Denise was brilliant. It’s funny – sometimes I almost forget that there’s two people playing Kelly, because when Denise shows up as ‘Elder Kelly’, as it said in the script, there’s a through-line that you weirdly just accept. People have even have asked if Denise is Gugu in prosthetic make-up, because we were so fortunate with the casting.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw:When I first met Owen and Charlie, I said, “So, what’s the deal – do I get to play it all? Am I gonna get some amazing prosthetics?” But Denise is so incredible. I’m glad it was done that way, because given what San Junipero is, it’s not as if you have to look like the same person.

Annabel Jones:We only discussed old-age make-up briefly, before ruling it out. You’ve got to at least have the discussion, but I think that stuff just always looks fake and throws you out of the moment.

Charlie Brooker:Well, you say that, but did you know that I’m a young person in make up?

Annabel Jones:I knew there was something odd, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Charlie Brooker:I’m just 24 years old.

Owen Harris:We went through the usual motions of looking for an older Gugu. Something about Denise and her choices as an actress – and also a Skype conversation where we just hit it off – made her feel right.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw:I had never met Denise, and so Owen set a bit of an exercise for us where we would read each other’s lines. Not to imitate, or really do anything very technical – it was more to just listen to each other and spend time together. It was really lovely to have that time.

Owen Harris:I would love to say that we were totally instrumental in making the change from young to old feel so seamless, but a lot of it was down to the simple fact that both actresses made the part so compelling.

Charlie’s original storyline had climaxed when Elder Kelly visited Yorkie in hospital.

Charlie Brooker:This was supposed to be the big emotional end: Kelly going in, kissing Yorkie on the forehead and saying, “Hello stupid, it’s good to see you.” I thought that was a sweet, tear-jerking ending: two dying old ladies who’d found love.

But I was enjoying the writing, so I thought I’d just keep going. And while working out what should happen next, I thought “Wait… what if, rather than dying, Yorkie’s going to be euthanised and live on in San Junipero?” It added a whole extra, deeper level. So that gave Yorkie more of a purpose. And I gave Kelly a whole back story, that I must have vaguely thought about already – things like her having been married for 40 years. So I added an end after the end, basically. And while I was writing, I thought this was much better. There was the big scene where Kelly turns on Yorkie with her big emotional speech that I’d written in one go. I was pleased with how that scene came out, because there was a lot of emotion and conflict.

Annabel Jones:I remember very clearly watching Gugu deliver Kelly’s big emotional speech to Yorkie on the cliff edge in Cape Town. Kelly talks about her husband – “The years I gave him, the years he gave me” – and her daughter – “Always difficult, always beautiful” – and I was just crying. The emotion Charlie conjures up with such economy is just breathtaking and Gugu’s performance was so impassioned, I knew we were making something very special. I texted Charlie to say the script was just beautiful but of course he deflected it by talking some shit. Probably something about a monkey in a fez.

Charlie Brooker:It’s hard to conceive that all this stuff wasn’t there to start with! The same goes for [Belinda Carlisle’s 1987 hit] Heaven Is a Place On Earth , which randomly popped up on a 1987 Spotify playlist I put together while I wrote. Listening to the lyrics, I thought, “This is perfect. Oh my god, we’ve got to license the song!”

I just kept pressing ‘repeat’ and suddenly I could see that ending. We could show a bank of servers with lights, and it really would be like Heaven is a place on Earth. It’s a joke and it resonates? Okay, perfect, boom.

Ugh. I just said “boom”.

I have heard people say, “Oh, San Junipero ’s the first time they’ve really done an emotional story.” But I don’t think that’s true, because they’re all emotional stories.

Annabel Jones:I think some people saw San Junipero as a ‘first’ because it was a happy, uplifting ending.

Charlie Brooker:People were worried for Kelly and Yorkie, because they’d seen us destroy people in Playtest and Shut Up and Dance . There’s an extra tension in a totally merciless show like this. That’s why San Junipero worked where it was in our Netflix running order. Across Season Three, film by film, we go, ‘Bittersweet, nasty, bloody nasty, happy… and then nasty, nasty.’

Owen Harris:I never read the story as being quite as positive as it ended up feeling. In fact, I’m probably a bit more like Kelly’s husband: more reticent about the idea of spending eternity in a place like San Junipero. I’d worry I’d end up in the Quagmire!

Annabel Jones:Whilst there is a positive upbeat ending, it’s not exactly a happy ever after. It’s more about being happy for now , and seeing how this goes. On the cliff, when Kelly delivers that speech and says, “What does forever even mean?”, that thought remains.

Charlie Brooker:But it is a deliberately triumphant ending. Quite often, we drop characters into a cage and watch them run around for a bit. And then mess with them even more. But every so often, you open the cage and let them out, like in San Junipero .

Owen Harris:The response has been amazing and totally unexpected. I’ve shot all over the world and everywhere I go I get a response. I even found out recently there’s a club night in Milan called San Junipero. I think the love story and the optimism came at such an opportune time and, being an episode of Black Mirror , from such an unexpected place. You sit down to watch one of these episodes and expect to be thrilled, surprised, alarmed and disturbed, but maybe the biggest surprise of all was to be uplifted.

Charlie Brooker:Because San Junipero ’s about two women falling for each other, it was doubly nerve-wracking because I hoped I’d got it right. It was gratifying when a lot of LGBTQ folk took it to heart and it resonated with them on an additional level. I was worried somebody might take it totally the wrong way, like, “What the fuck, people don’t talk like this!” You just don’t know. All you can ever do is imagine you are that person for a moment, and try to behave as they would for a bit, in your head. It’s a form of madness, isn’t it? Writing is all about sitting there and doing something mad.

Mackenzie Davis:The reception of the episode has been such an education on my own blindspots as a straight white woman. I could never have anticipated what a healthy, biracial love story – in which neither character dies – could mean to those who had experienced a dearth of positive depictions of their identities. I think that’s the very thing that attracted me to the story in the first place: when I read it and while we were making it, there was never a hint of discussion about it being a gay love story. It was a love story, in which two complete characters with rich histories find each other during a second chance at life. Period. Because the writing had no agenda – or didn’t feel like it was ‘statement first, story later’ – everyone from the cast to the creators to the audience got to experience the love story in a pure way, and process the implications of this particular love story after the fact.