It all starts with Cooper out on a sprawling world tour, traveling to India, Dubai, Spain, and more before arriving in London at the tail end of his journey. The first third of “Playtest” serves to set up the improbable circumstances that would lead a young American man to a creepy manor in the British countryside to playtest a VR horror videogame from a Japanese gaming giant.
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In initial drafts, it was more like one of the horror movie terms of the unlikable person who is put through a gauntlet to learn to have values.” There’s still that quality to him, but there’s a lovability and a naivete to Wyatt’s performance that informs the gravity of some of the things that he’s dealing with. “Initially, the character was much more of an ugly American. “What evolved the most was probably Wyatt Russell’s character,” Trachtenberg says. Trachtenberg and creator Charlie Brooker bonded over a shared love of both horror and videogames and quickly got to work fine-tuning Brooker’s concept into a lean horror machine. And four years to the day after its premiere, it still stands tall in the Black Mirror canon among the creative individuals who crafted it. This is the one installment of the show’s 22’s entries that is undeniably, unapologetically horror. That makes “Playtest” something truly unique in the Black Mirror canon. Though it all may be happening in Cooper’s head, the monsters created by Framestore are no less real to the viewer. In “Playtest,” the monsters of Black Mirror became literal with a grotesque human-spider hybrid and a shrieking flayed-faced zombie terrorizing Russell’s character Cooper Redfield as he playests the latest virtual reality videogame from a legendary game studio SaitoGemu. 21, 2016 it looked quite different from any other Black Mirror installment before it. Among those six episodes was “Playtest,” an hour starring Wyatt Russell ( Lodge 49), Wunmi Mosaku ( Lovecraft Country), and Hannah John-Kamen ( Ant-Man and the Wasp). Then the show was picked up by Netflix, which quickly commissioned a six-episode third season. Through two seasons and six episodes on Channel 4, the monsters of Black Mirror were largely metaphorical and unseen, signals and dispatches from mobile devices in a dubiously fictional world.
“I thought: ‘they want to make monsters for Black Mirror? I don’t get it,’” Walker says. But the nature of the job, for an episode called “Playtest”, proved to be an unexpected one. Monster specialist Grant Walker of award-winning VFX studio Framestore was excited when he received an offer to work on an episode of sci-fi anthology Black Mirror’s third season.