The beloved anthology series Black Mirror will return to our screens on June 15th for a sixth season. The cast list is more stacked than ever, with actors such as Salma Hayek, Michael Cera, Aaron Paul, Josh Hartnett, Rob Delaney and plenty more lending themselves to Charlie Brooker’s dystopian universe.
The first episode in the new series is called ‘Joan is Awful’, with Annie Murphy playing the titular character. It follows Joan, a normal woman, who realises her life is the subject of a show on a Netflix-esque platform called ‘Streamberry’, with Hayek playing her.
In a new interview with Empire, Brooker revealed that he received no obstacles from Netflix when he pitched the idea to them, despite the similarities between the popular streaming service and ‘Streamberry’.
He explained, “We just said, ‘We’ve got this streaming platform called Streamberry in this episode… can we make it look like Netflix?’ They went away and came back quite quickly — weirdly quickly — and said, ‘Yeah, okay.'”
“There wasn’t any resistance to it, that I could tell. Which is a bit disappointing, because it would be good to be able to say ‘I just did it anyway, because I’m an anarchist!’ But no.”
Brooker added, “That episode is quite meta and weird anyway. It’s one thing me watching it in the edit, but the thought that people are going to be watching it on the Netflix platform itself? That’s quite bonkers.”
Moreover, he revealed that he had Murphy in mind while writing the role. “Annie Murphy was quite quickly in my head as Joan because I’d watched Schitt’s Creek during the pandemic, like everyone else, and she’s so naturally funny and likeable.”
Watch the teaser below.
