Black Mirror actress Annie Murphy has claimed that one unexpected revelation in the first episode of season six, Joan Is Awful, left her thinking it was a ‘bad mistake’.
The Schitt’s Creek star plays Joan, a “ordinary lady” whose life is flipped upside down when her acts are reenacted in a massive TV adaption on streaming giant Streamberry.
Annie is forced to relive everything, from an affair with her ex-partner to how she treats her coworkers, however on screen, Joan is played by Salma Hayek.
So she reasoned. It turns out that not only is Salma portraying Joan, but Annie is as well, and an original’source’ Joan exists in real life.
Annie’s Joan is, in fact… Mrs. Annie Murphy.
Talking about the shocking twist, Annie told Metro.co.uk: ‘It was so wild and then to also hear my name, my actual personal name involved in this show… I was like, “I feel like someone’s made a terrible mistake, are we sure about this?”
‘But it was, yes, it was was a crazy script to read and it was a crazy life moment to experience.’
Talking about the ending of the episode, in which Joan and Annie (unlike several other season six stars) survive and look towards a brighter future, she said: ‘We’re really kind of put through the wringer throughout the episode, and so I think the way it ended was still slightly dark, but one of the lighter endings to a Black Mirror episode that I’ve seen, and slightly optimistic.
‘And hopeful, which is a really nice change of pace given the world in which we live and given the world Charlie [Brooker] creates most of the time.’
She continued: ‘I was really happy to see that Charlie was kind of like letting us start off in a more optimistic tone.
‘And I think he even admitted after pandemic and all of the bulls**t that everyone has been through over the last bunch of years, that he felt like he owed everyone just like a bit of a breath of fresh air before diving back into the the horror of it all.’
This comes after Charlie, the showrunner, said that Joan Is Awful was inspired by Elizabeth Holmes, the infamous founder of startup Theranos.
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.’
Black Mirror is available to watch on Netflix.
Source My Celebrity Life.
