Jimmi Simpson on Cast Aways unexpected influence in Black Mirror: USS Callister: Into Infinity
With Season 7 of Black Mirror, series superfan Jimmi Simpson returned to reprise the roles of video game billionaire James Walton and his less vicious in-game clone in "USS Callister: Into Infinity." Mashable Entertainment Editor Kristy Puchko sat down with Simpson over Zoom for an interview about what it was like to come back to Black Mirror. And beyond that, what was it like to go full-on Cast Away with a touch of Oldboy?
Sure, Clone Walton was thought to be dead after his heroic self-sacrifice at the end of "USS Callister." However, "Into Infinity" reveals that he'd be respawned on an unpopulated planet in the online MMORPG Infinity. When Clone Nanette (Cristin Milioti) finds him, Clone Walton is basically looking and living like Tom Hanks deep into the stranded-on-a-desert-island movie Cast Away, right down to having an inanimate, spherical buddy with a smiley face drawn on in blood.
Asked if Simpson watched Cast Away to tap into this mindset, he said, "I saw that movie in the theater when it came out [2000]. I certainly enjoyed it, like everybody else, and I know [the writers, which included Charlie Brooker, William Bridges, Bisha K. Ali, and Bekka Bowling] were going for a Cast Away kind of send-up. It was already there. I didn't need [to revisit]. If I were to re-watch it, I probably would have grabbed specific things, and I don't think it needed that. They set it up. You get what it is."
If anything, Simpson felt his inspiration point came from the movies he loved in his childhood. "There's this late '80s movie Enemy Mine, where Dennis Quaid — he's thrust onto this planet," he said. "It feels like an '80s thing, where the star is now stuck on this other planet to figure out how to live. And I felt like I was just living that thing. I'd watched those movies as a kid forever. So that was like a dream."
Referring to the scene in Black Mirror where Clone Walton fishes and then bites into an alien species, he continued, "Eating space octopi was like a dream come true. Honestly, [the production team was] like, 'We're sorry if it doesn't taste good.' I'm like, 'I don't care. This is the coolest!'"
What does space octopus taste like? "It was like a slightly sweet blue dye flavor."