Black Mirror Kept The Stars Of Shut Up And Dance As Confused As Their Characters
"Black Mirror" is known for its jaw-dropping plot twists, but perhaps none were quite so gut-wrenchingly unexpected as the surprise ending to "Shut Up and Dance." In easily one of the scariest "Black Mirror" episodes ever, the audience is missing a crucial piece of information that puts the entire story in perspective and drastically shifts their otherwise sympathetic view of the protagonist, played by Alex Lawther. Lawther's character is blindly led through a perilous scavenger hunt by an anonymous puppet master. As it turns out, the episode was as much of a mystery to Lawther as it was to his character.
The dystopian Netflix series — which returns for season six in June — has a reputation for concealing the episodes' subjects from the actors during auditions, made possible by its episodic storytelling mode. When Lawther auditioned to play the bumbling shut-in at the center of "Shut Up and Drive," he wasn't sure what exactly the episode — or the role — would entail.
"At first, I auditioned with only a couple of scenes," the actor revealed to GQ. "It was very top-secret. As I got further in the audition process, they released the script — but even in the preliminary scenes I read, I was very excited by the premise."
The story was a total mystery to Lawther, even after he had read several scenes. He was only given very preliminary information about his character, and it was up to him to play Kenny to the best of his abilities with what little background he was given.
"I knew there was a boy called Kenny, trying to deliver a cake to somebody," he recalled. "And he seemed very worried. But I didn't know exactly why. That was all I had to go by. I had no idea about the twist that comes at the end."
Life imitated art for Alex Lawther
Of course, the cake delivery isn't even the half of it. Kenny is nervous about delivering this cake because he is being blackmailed by an anonymous internet troll with a video of Kenny masturbating that the hacker extracted from his webcam. The audience is made to sympathize with Kenny as an unsuspecting victim of a sinister web criminal — until the very end when it is revealed that Kenny is a pedophile.
The hackers' anonymity also obfuscates their morality and their motives. They are mischievous, then terrifying, then magnanimous. By keeping the hackers totally hidden throughout the episode, even at the very end, the writers maintain another level of dramatic suspense that works on the audience as well as the actors, as Lawther explained:
"What was sort of wonderful was that the hackers, for us, remained anonymous. The characters have no idea why they're being targeted. Why them, and who are these people [targeting them]? As actors, we didn't give ourselves time to come to any conclusions. And I think that was right. The characters are thrown headlong into this torturous trial, and we actors shared that in common with the characters. We weren't given the chance to intellectualize it."
Lawther met his co-star for the first time on set
Lawther's experience imitated Kenny's in other ways, too. He and his co-star Jerome Flynn play two of the hacker's blackmail victims that are forced to work together. The two characters are suspicious of one another, but their common enemy — and goal — forces them into a stand-offish camaraderie. Lawther found himself in a similarly awkward situation with Flynn that produced a dynamic almost identical to that of their characters.
"What was interesting is that Jerome and I had never met before, the shoot is quite quick," Lawther recounted to Digital Spy. He continued:
"We shot in three weeks, so there was not much time to get to know each other [...] And so it sort of helped being thrown together in a claustrophobic car with a camera crew and any of that sort of unfamiliarity with each other is very real! Since then we've hung out but at the time we were thrown headlong into the f***ed up world of [series creator] Charlie Brooker's!"
In the end, the lack of familiarity between the two characters gave their timid dynamic a more realistic texture.
"Their relationship has a slightly farcical quality, and they're uncomfortable in each other's presence — which was aided by the fact that Jerome and I had never worked together before," Lawther told GQ. "We shot quite quickly, over three weeks, and that speed meant that we didn't have any time to socialize. By the end of it, we were good friends, but in the beginning, we were... trying to figure each other out, I suppose."
By suspending their meeting until filming began, the actors' experience imitated the uncomfortable unfamiliarity of Kenny and Hector. Just as the actors were "thrown headlong" into Brooker's story, so too were their characters thrown headlong into the hackers' scavenger hunt.
Even Lawther had trouble remembering Kenny was the bad guy
Even after Lawther found out about that crazy twist-ending, he still had to be reminded to incorporate that knowledge into his performance. The audience wouldn't understand why Kenny was so highly emotional, but Kenny — and Lawther — definitely would.
"[Director] James Watkins kept giving me gentle nudges, reminding me how high the stakes were for Kenny," the actor recalled. "The audience might be thinking, 'Oh, come on. You haven't done anything that wrong.' And then we find out exactly what he has done."
Therein lies the genius of "Shut Up and Dance." Some creative choices might feel excessive before the big reveal, just like keeping the episode's details a secret might have felt frustrating for Lawther during the audition process, but the drama of Kenny's unveiling makes it all worth it. The audience and characters had to feel like they were operating in the dark, led by an invisible hand — in Kenny's case, the blackmail of the hackers, and in the audience's case, Kenny's concealed dramatic motive. In "Shut Up and Dance," the narrative invites the audience to do mental gymnastics right into the wrong conclusion. The characters dance, the actors dance — and so, too, do you.