Black Mirror star Rosemarie DeWitt teases Jodie Foster's episode

Nick Romano
Updated

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Part of the joy of Black Mirror is seeing all the bonkers sci-fi unfold as it comes. So, while Rosemarie DeWitt (La La Land) didn’t divulge too much, the actress hit up Entertainment Weekly: The Show to tease some of the themes to her season 4 episode.

“Arkangel,” directed by Jodie Foster, sees how far a mother (DeWitt) would go to keep her child safe. A scare at the playground leads a woman to inject her daughter with new technology. Because this is Black Mirror we’re dealing with, it doesn’t go as planned.

“Thinking about it, you know, our phones are everything, they’re kind of benign,” DeWitt says. “They’re kind of like a blender or something. It’s how you use it, and so the real dance of this episode is how I use this technology.”

DeWitt, personally, isn’t into technology. In fact, she describes herself as a Luddite. “I’m not on any social media, I don’t even know what things are. I’m so behind the times,” she says. “I took the baby monitors out at like six months because I felt it was an invasion of privacy. Like, I’m that kook.”

Showrunner Charlie Brooker, who also wrote “Arkangel,” described the episode to EW as “almost within the world of an indie drama.” As for signing Foster onto the project…

“Netflix had worked with her before and they suggested Jodie. We were like, ‘Really? You think she would?'” he said. “We had a Skype conversation during which I managed to keep my cool and not freak out. She responded to the script and she had a lot of thoughts and suggestions on the characters so there were a lot of adjustments. She’s not just a gun for hire; she’s incredibly intelligent and comes in with some thoughts on the material. Which is what you want in a director because each story is a standalone [episode], so you want each to be idiosyncratic to that director. And she brought a lot of that.”