The 'Black Mirror' Season 6 Cast Includes Aaron Paul and Paapa Essiedu
Netflix only announced a couple of months ago that the sixth season of its award-winning dystopian anthology series Black Mirror was officially in the works after a three-year hiatus, but the production appears to already be swinging into high gear with word of its first round of official (and predictably big-name) casting decisions.
According to Variety, which first broke the casting news, Season 6 will include such familiar faces as Aaron Paul (Westworld), Paapa Essiedu (I May Destroy You), Josh Hartnett (Penny Dreadful), Zazie Beetz (Atlanta), Kate Mara (House of Cards), Danny Ramirez (On My Block), Clara Rugaard (The Rising), Anjana Vasan (We Are Lady Parts) and Auden Thornton (This is Us). Per Variety's sources, this cadre of actors only spans the season's first three episodes and more names are expected to join the cast as the production continues.
Story details are still being kept under wraps and there's no word yet on who any of these folks will play, which episodes they'll appear in, or how big their roles will be. What we do know is that Season 6 will have more episodes than Season 5, which featured just three installments ("Striking Vipers," "Smithereens," and "Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too"). It will also reportedly continue to embrace the cinematic feel of recent seasons, with extended episodes that are treated as though they are individual films.
Black Mirror is an anthology that's basically a modern, more technologically savvy version of The Twilight Zone, which explore the ways that things like social media apps, online home security systems, dating services, smart assistants, and other devices that we freely and unquestioningly give our data to have all had unanticipated (and generally negative!) effects on modern society. Each episode is a standalone story and the series can be watched in pretty much any order. (Though there are hints that some of the tales may exist within a larger shared universe.)
Originally launched on the U.K. network channel Channel 4 in 2011, the series garnered international attention for its dark and occasionally twisted tales of technological dystopia, scoring a Netflix pickup in 2015 and eventually garnering eight Emmy awards and both critical and popular acclaim. Season 5 premiered back in June of 2019 and featured stories starring famous faces like Miley Cyrus and Anthony Mackie. Previous installments have featured everyone from Hayley Atwell and Jessica Brown Findlay to Domhnall Gleeson, Andrew Scott, and Jon Hamm.
Seasons 1-5 of Black Mirror are currently streaming on Netflix.
