Salma Hayek has opened up about her concerns about playing an interpretation of “herself” in the new season of Black Mirror. The Frida actor appears in the episode “Joan is Awful” of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology drama in the sixth season.
Black Mirror was last broadcast on Netflix in 2019. In the episode, a real lady named Joan (played by Salma Hayek) finds that her life has been made into a TV program on a Netflix-like streaming service.
Salma Hayek
Guess who’s back, back again!
After a four-year hiatus, Black Mirror returns to Netflix this week, with a cast that includes Hollywood icon Salma Hayek. The Desperado actor (and film producer) stars in ‘Joan is Awful’, one of the five new episodes in the dystopian anthology series. When asked about the character in the new episode, Hayek claimed it was a
“once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play an interpretation of myself.”
In the new episode, a lady named Joan (played by Annie Murphy from Schitt’s Creek) realizes that her life has been made into a TV program on a global streaming service, with A-lister Salma Hayek playing her.
“I got to explore the concepts and clichés people have about me and be self-deprecating. It’s as if I created an alter ego where I could do the most disgusting, grotesque things that you would never do in real life… and have permission to do that. There are so many moments that shocked me in the script. There is one huge one that I had to come to terms with, and that made me ask myself, ‘Do I really want to do this? Am I going to get in trouble?'”
Read more: Salma Hayek Danced With a Snake in 1996 George Clooney Film as She “Really needed to pay the rent”
The eerie, dystopian plot of the episode (Spoiler alert!)
Hayek co-stars with Annie Murphy and Michael Cera in a twisty story about an ordinary woman named Joan (Murphy) who discovers that her life is being turned into a prestige television drama on the worldwide streaming platform ‘Streamberry’, which is a fun Netflix spoof. Both Murphy’s Joan and Hayek’s Salma are eventually shown to be one of many computer-generated replicas of someone else in a parallel timeline, leveraging the ‘digital likeness’ of another’s appearance – in this case, Hayek’s and Murphy’s faces.
Annie Murphy
As the tension builds up, Joan (Murphy) decides to go on an embarrassing cringe spree, leading up to her defecating in a church during a wedding, knowing that a fictitious Salma will have to replicate the blasphemous act of desecrating a church on the show. Salma gets upset and meets with her lawyer in the hopes of having the episode pulled from the air.
To know how the rest of it unfolds, watch the episode now!
Source: Fox News
