Warning! This article contains major spoilers for the Black Mirror episode Beyond The Sea.
Black Mirror star Josh Hartnett has shared his take on his episode’s shock ending.
The Pearl Harbour star takes the lead in Beyond The Sea, in which he and Aaron Paul play David and Cliff, astronauts aboard a two-person ship in the middle of outer space.
Meanwhile, the characters each have “replicas” on earth which they can inhabit while in hyperspace.
David experiences a tragedy early on in which his family are killed by a cult, leading Cliff to allow him to use his own “replica” so he can have a break from the isolation of their spacecraft.
Things get complicated when David begins having feelings for Cliff’s wife Lana, with the episode ending in a grisly and violent fashion.
Speaking during a Q&A at the BFI after a screening of Beyond The Sea, Josh admitted he felt his character is actually “misunderstood”.
After creator Charlie Brooker spoke about the parallels between Covid lockdown and what the astronauts in the episode experience, Josh continued: “To me, instead of it being a ‘white hat/black hat’, ‘good and evil’ story, felt like pretty much what Charlie was just talking about – it being during lockdown, remote work – but also a story of someone with abundance, or someone with scarcity.
“[The episode] deals with love and companionship and touch – the fact that these people haven’t been touched in years, but they get this sort of simulated touch. And David has this obvious need, from the very first scene, to connect with Cliff on a different level, and that doesn’t ever come to fruition.
“I felt like I got it, and I understood why he went to that place. It didn’t feel necessarily evil, it felt necessary. And when you read a script that has such darkness to it, and it still feels necessary, that’s when you know that you’ve got something really special.”
On how things turn out for David and Cliff, Josh added: “I would say that I don’t think that it was his first choice of action, but I do think that he once he got to the point where Cliff denied him any sort of contact, and said that Lana thought he was a creep, and that it was just utterly over for him, and he has no place back on the planet, I think he decided he had to do something drastic.”
Five brand new episodes of Black Mirror are now streaming on Netflix as part of the dystopian drama’s sixth season.
Among them is Demon 79, which Charlie wrote with a new horror-inspired “Red Mirror” label in mind, and Joan Is Awful, a star-studded episode which has been billed as ““one of our most overtly comic episodes that we’ve ever done”.
