Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Robyn Paiba (co-production designer):Pig Fuck, as we called it, was of its time. Whilst we were shooting, the London riots were happening, which were enabled by early social media and messaging services that had not had to be monitored on this level before… and we were shooting a story that was all about an inability to control the internet-based media form.

Shane Allen (then Channel 4’s Head of Comedy):I do remember a debate about why it had to be a pig. Charlie considered a duck too small and absurd. A horse or donkey seemed too cinematically cumbersome.

Barney Reisz:At one point there was talk of doing it as a chicken, rather than a pig. In the end, Charlie stood his ground. We were quite far in by that point, so we had to shoot something.

One memorable scene sees Callow lose his temper and physically attack the home secretary Alex Cairns (Lindsay Duncan) in his office.

Charlie Brooker:It’s quite shocking when Michael literally launches himself at her. In the script, it just says he loses it. He finds out she’s been trying to find something to get him off the hook, but now she’s put everything in jeopardy. I didn’t really know how a Prime Minister would react, so I thought I’d just have him go bananas.

Otto Bathurst:It was meant to be a visceral scene. Lindsay’s performance is fantastic: she’s happy , and it’s really, really evil. What I find so shocking is that she barely bats an eyelid. That kind of abuse is accepted within the job. In theory, he should be kicked out of politics, kicked out of anything, but the pressure and the abuse inherent in that job, means that she just steps away and smooths down her skirt. Another day in the office…

Charlie Brooker:I assumed that Callow implicitly trusts Alex. So when he discovers she’s gone behind his back, he’s furious, in an odd way that he possibly wouldn’t be with someone he doesn’t know as well. He’s not just angry, he’s betrayed. I think it was actually scripted that they end up on the floor: he tries to launch himself at her and then he falls and it was all a bit ridiculous. But what would someone do if they were put in that position where they might have to fuck a pig on television? And it makes it more real, all of a sudden, because you certainly don’t expect Callow to lose his fucking mind for a moment. And it’s a woman, which makes it even more shocking.

Rory does so well at humanising the Prime Minister. It’s a really clever performance. He’s a little bit prickly, he’s not particularly nice to people around him because he’s so worried. He seems like he’s quite a decent guy but he can be a little selfish and explosive and lose his rag. He’s so good at being someone who’s just dropped into this nightmare early on. It’s weird, as if suddenly the Prime Minister becomes the underdog in the whole episode as he gets all of his powers stripped away from him. And then there’s that moment where Alex turns on him and says there’s no way out.

Annabel Jones:A lot of times in drama there’s a tendency to have political caricatures, and it just gets a bit wearisome. It would have been very easy for us to have a Tory Prime Minister that everyone hates, so that we can enjoy heaping this public humiliation upon him. But I wanted the focus to be on the public’s appetite for public humiliation. So if we could set up that Tory PM, but then show the ramifications for his family, to his wife – that seems more interesting than “Let’s hate the Tory”.

Charlie Brooker:It’s a weirdly sympathetic portrayal of a Prime Minister. We deliberately don’t ever say what party he is, although he is seen wearing a blue tie at one point, which implies he’s a Tory. He does seem like he’s probably a Tory PM but we don’t ever say. He’s actually one of the most sympathetic characters in it. My sister-in-law is an Ealing MP, and you see how hard she works. Callow’s set up to be someone with a whiff of public school about him. You’d normally go, “Fuck that guy”, so this felt like quite a nice reversal. There’s a key moment about halfway through when his wife comes in and faces off with him, really upset. That’s when you see the personal impact it’s having.

Annabel Jones:Callow’s wife Jane plays a key role in placing it in the personal. When he says, “But it won’t happen,” and she says, “That doesn’t matter, they’re thinking it already, so it might as well have happened.”

Charlie Brooker:I don’t know how some viewers can be angry with Jane for telling Michael how she feels. That feels like a misreading of what’s going on there, because it’s not meant to be that she betrays him in any way. It’s more that she’s communicating how upset she is. She’s worried and, you know, they’ve got a fucking baby. What’s going on has irrevocably changed something in their relationship and she can’t deal with that.

Otto Bathurst:Actors often draw on personal experience. So if they’re in a tragic scene, they’ll think of what it’d be like if a loved one died. But when you’re pulling your trousers down in front of a pig, it’s quite hard to know what to draw on. That scene where Callow’s walking down the corridor, approaching the pig – that look of absolute horror on his face. In lesser hands, it could’ve become farcical. If we’d got it wrong, you’d have laughed.

Robyn Paiba:I had to avoid scaring off the animal handlers, while gently talking them through the basic storyline about a Prime Minister having to perform a sex act on their lovely pig. Practical considerations about the height of the pig, etc., really highlighted the ludicrous nature of my job sometimes!

Otto Bathurst:I think we did two takes with the pig and that was it. The pig then got a bit wise to it all and started wandering off. We were never, ever going to show anything more graphic than what we got. But Rory went right up to it, pretty close. We shot more than what the film eventually showed, but he never dropped his boxers in front of the pig, that’s for sure.

Charlie Brooker:The pig was called Madge. Me, Annabel, Otto, my wife Konnie Huq and Barney Reisz were all hiding in a cupboard that day, staring at a monitor, in the room where the pig scene was being filmed. No one shouted cut for quite a long time on the first take of Rory approaching the pig. He sort of went up to it and had to pull his trousers down… and then he moved up… and said, “That’s as far as I’m going, everyone!”

Annabel Jones:I have to say, it was very brave of Rory to take that role on, in terms of what he was being asked to do – especially with Black Mirror being unknown and never having gone out before. It was a very risky move on his part, so I’m grateful.

Otto Bathurst:Everyone on set was more concerned about the pig than Rory! I absolutely assure you that the trauma would have stayed with Rory a lot longer than it would’ve stayed with the pig. The pig was fine: it had its face in a bowl of food, with no idea what was going on.

Charlie Brooker:During that live broadcast of Callow and the pig, there was a scene we cut out. We’d shown lots of people in a hospital throughout and now they’re watching the news as work grinds to a halt. The journalist Malaika had been shot in the leg, but at the end there was a punchline where she gets taken to this hospital and she’s just left on a gurney when the Prime Minister starts fucking the pig. So no one helps her because they’re all glued to the TV, and they’ve left her at an angle where she can’t quite see the screen. So that was a little joke that didn’t make it in, but I can’t remember if we filmed it or not. And so it’s never explained why these people are in a hospital, but there’s enough going on that you don’t really notice.