Note: The following Zazie Beetz, Danny Ramirez and Clara Rugaar interview discusses major spoilers for “Black Mirror” Season 6, Episode 4: “Mazey Day.”
“Black Mirror” Season 6, Episode 4 (titled “Mazey Day”) lifts the veil on the dark side of Hollywood stardom. Zazie Beetz stars as Bo, an invasive paparazzo who will go to any lengths to snap a photo of Mazey Day (Clara Rugaar) — until a devastating hit-and-run unravels the starlet’s glamorous life and success and Bo reconsiders the morality of her profession.
“It’s a really interesting way to very literally visualize, ‘Oh, you want to uncover people’s dirty laundry, well, then here it is — and it will stain you, too,’” Beetz told TheWrap. “People all have private lives [and] private worlds that need careful tending to in a safe environment, and if you open it up, then it leaves everybody raw and exposed, including the person.”
Mazey’s hit-and-run accident happens after a stressful day of shooting on location. To unwind from the pressures of her work, she takes some magic mushrooms, pairing it with some wine. Things get foggy from there: The exact details of the accident are not revealed to the audience all at once, but it’s clear Mazey faced some irreparable trauma that prompts her to go off the grid, exiting the acting project and seeking medical aid from a notorious doctor.
Bo, meanwhile, has taken herself out of the paparazzi game. But when she hears that there’s a staggering price on the market for the first photographer to get Mazey’s photo while hospitalized, she’s drawn back in and begins investigating where the actress might be.
Joined by her friend, Hector (Danny Ramirez), and two other photographers who follow them, Bo is led to a cleared-out rehabilitation center where the crew finds Mazey chained to the floor with a metal collar. Disturbed by Mazey’s state, Bo attempts to free her, but the other photographers continue to snap photos in hopes of their big payday — even as Mazey transforms into an unrecognizable creature that attacks everything in sight.
Playing Mazey, Rugaar reflected that the beast we see in the end is her getting “to claim back a bit of her own control.” Ramirez, meanwhile, refrained from revealing too much about the last scene’s significance, noting that “the experience of watching the episode without the spill” is key. But he shared that after filming the episode’s conclusion, he knew it would be an “absolute banger.”
“The metaphor itself was something that was really exciting in, first of all, being surprised by it when reading it, and then also seeing it,” Ramirez said. “The transformation scene is epic and completely comes out of nowhere, and it earns every step of it… The moment you get there, you realize how big of a swing it was, but also there is no other place for it to go.”
“Black Mirror” Season 6 is now streaming on Netflix.
