‘Black Mirror’ Season 6: Kate Mara & Josh Hartnett on “Beyond the Sea”

With a brand-new season of Black Mirror finally having dropped on Netflix, it’s safe to say that this latest installment of Charlie Brooker‘s sci-fi anthology series was well worth the wait. There are some distinct changes the writer and creator has made to the formula of the show — including an intriguing Red Mirror label that one hopes could signal a horror spinoff later on down the road — but Season 6 also reminds us of what Black Mirror has always done best in offering up phenomenal performances to devastating effect.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the season’s third episode, “Beyond the Sea,” starring Josh Hartnett and Aaron Paul as David and Cliff, two astronauts in a retrofuturistic world who are currently serving on a deep-space mission while occasionally inhabiting replicas of their own bodies left on Earth. When tragedy strikes for David’s family, Cliff and his wife Lana (Kate Mara) decide to offer up Cliff’s replica for David to use every once in a while, but no one could have predicted what would result from it — a complicated, thorny tangle of emotions between three people as physical boundaries start to come down.

In spite of the heavy subject material, however, both Hartnett and Mara had nothing but good things to say about their co-star and shared scene partner during a junket ahead of the season’s premiere. “I’ve known Aaron for years but not very well, and we’ve never worked together before,” Mara told Collider, “so this was the first time that we really got to act together, and we had such an amazing experience making this. You never know what it’s gonna be like, especially when you have to go to some really emotional places. It was a really lovely, lovely experience.”

Meanwhile, Hartnett noted that the set of the spaceship made for a markedly different atmosphere, but it also meant that he and Paul were able to find time to back away from some of the episode’s darker scenes:

“We had none of the lovely countryside stuff together, but we were in a tin can together, which is nice, and it was a beautiful set. He’s a very positive and easy person to be around and funny. When you’re doing something as intense as this, it’s nice to have a scene partner and a collaborator who you trust and get along with, and we get along really well.”

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Charlie Brooker Was Inspired to Write “Beyond the Sea” During Lockdown

Hartnett’s David is an emotionally complex figure in “Beyond the Sea,” and one that seems to descend to some fairly low places as the story goes on — but when asked about his character’s darkness, Hartnett made an interesting point about why he doesn’t necessarily consider David that way. The actor pointed out that the plot of the episode is more about what happens when people are pushed to a breaking point, but also said that Charlie Brooker himself drew from real-life circumstances that many of us were facing at the time he wrote the episode.

“This is probably the most pressure cookery situation that a person could be in — six years of isolation, they’re only two years in, and he’s lost his only connection to the outside world and the person that he’s with, their mind is somewhere else the whole time. He’s on his own, and he’s gone through an extraordinary trauma and can’t quite place it yet. Yeah, it’s very, very bleak. … Charlie wrote this during lockdown. I think he was feeling maybe a little bit isolated from the people he wanted to be around, and so it was like an extrapolation of those events in his mind.”

Without going too deeply into spoilers, Hartnett also added that he wanted the ending of “Beyond the Sea” to feel more ambiguous for the audience, at least in terms of determining who was really in the right and how both men could be capable of terrible acts: “I wanted there to be a sense—and I don’t know if it’s in the show or not, but this is how I read it—that it could have gone either way for sure. If the roles were reversed, it would have been just as plausible.”

The new season of Black Mirror also stars Annie Murphy, Salma Hayek, Michael Cera, Samuel Blenkin, Myha’la Herrold, Daniel Portman, Zazie Beetz, Danny Ramirez, Clara Rugaard, Anjana Vasan, and Paapa Essiedu. Keep your eyes peeled for more of our interviews with the cast of Black Mirror Season 6 coming soon!

All seasons of Black Mirror are currently available to stream on Netflix.