Charlie Brooker, the creator of Black Mirror, has disclosed that the opening episode of season six was inspired by Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of company Theranos.
The highly anticipated new season has finally arrived on Netflix, four years after the fifth installment, and has a superb ensemble including Aaron Paul and Michael Cera spanning five episodes.
The season begins with Joan is Awful, which follows a ‘ordinary lady,’ played by Annie Murphy, who discovers her life has been surprisingly extended into a major adaption starring Salma Hayek.
As Joan attempts to recover control over her secrets being revealed on a massive streaming platform, mayhem follows, only for her to discover a startling twist that has her rethinking all of her decisions.
While it’s one of the less ominous episodes of the current season, Charlie has disclosed that his inspiration came from a genuine event.
He told us: ‘Joan is Awful this season, I had half an idea which was, is there a story about… the title for some reason stuck in my head.
‘And I was thinking, is there a story about an average woman who finds herself on the front page of the newspaper?
‘She’s the lead item on the news – not because she’s involved in a terrible scandal, or she’s done something heroic, but just she’s like, [the] main character of the day, her co-workers don’t like the way she chews her food or something minor like that. I was like, I don’t know what the story is, but it’s a funny situation.’
He continued: ‘There’s another idea… which was to do [with] like deep fake AI generated imagery being streamed by a news network. But I didn’t know what to do with either of these ideas. So you’ve got an idea, but you don’t have a story.
‘And then I was watching The Dropout, which is the dramatisation of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos story, and I was watching that with my wife and we were sort of commenting on like, god, this feels like it happened yesterday, and here it is already a drama on TV.’
He explained that those two ‘half ideas’ were suddenly ‘sucked up into this one’.
Charlie went on to say that instead of ‘leaving an idea behind,’ it’s ‘playing on a loop somewhere in the back of your head, and you find the place for it.’
Salma, the star of Magic Mike, warned ahead of the episode’s release that one especially gruesome sequence made her worried she’d be in trouble.
She told Radio Times: ‘It’s as if I created an alter ego where I could do the most disgusting, grotesque things that you would never do in real life… and have permission to do that.
‘It’s been surreal, and I think only a mind like Charlie Brooker’s could have come up with such a concept.
‘There are so many moments that shocked me in the script. There is one huge one that I had to come to terms with, and made me ask myself, “Do I really want to do this? Am I going to get in trouble?”‘
Black Mirror is now available to watch on Netflix.
