Inside Black Mirror

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (film, 1987) John Hughes’ comedy starring Steve Martin.

Charlie Brooker: The show has changed quite a bit, actually. If you look at the first series, The Entire History of You is closest to ones we’ve done more recently, with invasive technology in people’s eyes. But it’s morphed. It went very, very VR for a while, and now we’re moving out of that into some other phase. We can revisit old ideas we’ve do

Black Museum is a bit more DC comics, a bit more [the 90s US horror anthology series] Tales from the Crypt. There’s literally a guy taking you round a museum of nasty things, so it’s heightened and slightly Stephen King. Everything’s ramped up and it’s quite playfully ghoulish in places. But also then, on another level, it’s about punishment and ra

McCarthy: Charlie’s really, really good in the edit. He uses reasonableness incredibly aggressively, in order to get what he wants! He’s incredibly entertaining and charming, too, and understands how that process works. So there were a lot of creative conversations and debates which made the show better. It wouldn’t have been made better by Charlie

But at least they haven’t edited you into a new body where all your limbs are dicks, and you’re constantly falling on your own balls. Or you’ve got 50 arseholes over your mouth that keep shitting onto your own lips. Annabel Jones: Emmy-award-winning writing, right there.

Charlie Brooker: I used the toilet in an airport in Singapore. And as I was walking out, there was this sign saying, “How was the toilet today?” with happy-face or sad-face buttons. Immediately, I thought, “Urgh, I’m not touching that, because it’s in a toilet!” And then I thought, “Look at that fucking dystopian imagery they’ve put in my eye-line

read Rolo on the page, I hated him. Doug had to go Method, because you cannot come in and out of that character. We really got into our characters a lot, because it was so deep and there had to be so much focus and concentration.

Nixon and I’m currently playing a Guantanamo Bay torturer, but none of them come close to Rolo Haynes’ unempathetic glee. Playing him was like swallowing a small thimble of poison each morning. Every day, the whole thing felt more toxic – especially as it was essentially a black cast and Rolo was a white supremacist.

Penn Jillette: Charlie did talk about the framing mechanism he wanted to do, and we talked about museums in Vegas, but whatever is great about Black Museum, that’s Charlie. I desperately wanted to play the lead character Rolo, even though it would have cost an extraordinary amount of money for me and Teller to cancel our Las Vegas shows during the