🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Think of the Season 6 premiere of Black Mirror like a Russian doll. Just when you think you have the mystery of “Joan Is Awful” cracked, another doll pops out to reveal even more dimension to the story. Like the fact that the Joan we’ve been following the whole time, as played by Annie Murphy, is in fact not the real Joan. “Source Joan” is actually played by Canadian actor Kayla Lorette — you can check out her audition tape above. 

For the majority of the episode, viewers are led to believe that Murphy’s Joan is an average woman living in an average city, who’s shocked to turn on the TV one night and see Salma Hayek Pinault playing her in a TV adaptation of the day she has just lived called Joan Is Awful. But the kicker is that the Murphy we see is just an AI-generated version of Murphy that’s licensed her image, and is acting out the life of Lorette’s Joan — the Source Joan.

“Bless the entire crew having to constantly be like, ‘Which level are we on?’ ” Lorette tells Tudum of the mind-bending Fictive Levels for each Joan in Streamberry’s AI-generated television series. “It hurts the brain, but I think the episode does a good job being like, ‘We know it hurts the brain.’ ”

Back when Lorette auditioned for Black Mirror, she was just “desperately grasping at context clues” to guess why the character’s name would at one point in the episode go from Joan to Source Joan. “You’re getting a sliver of what the story is,” Lorette says. “But what’s so great about this episode, and most of Black Mirror, is even just these little fragments are so grounded and you just have to play them as sincerely as you can with the information you’re given.”

While Murphy and Hayek Pinault wore wigs for the production, Lorette was the only actor who actually dyed her hair to truly portray Joan’s blonde, face-framing highlights, which meant she “got to be a different person for a bit” while she filmed the episode in London for a month. That all stems from the production team of Black Mirror trying to make Source Joan’s world “feel the most of our world — the least glamorous, the most kind of normal,” says Lorette. Even the cinematography of Source Joan’s reality — as shot by DP Catherine Lutes using natural lighting — is intentionally loose and least cinematic of the “Joan Is Awful” Fictive Levels. 

Although Lorette didn’t film many scenes with Murphy or Hayek Pinault, director Ally Pankiw did have the three actors sit together and read scenes to inform small tics and gestures that they’d share in each of their portrayals of Joan. “It was very fun to watch Annie’s little mannerisms and try to pick up on them,” says Lorette.

To land the part of Source Joan, Lorette went through two rounds of auditions, one live over Zoom and then a follow-up self-tape, after originally hearing of the gig through her old friend Pankiw. “She’s incredibly generous and really cares about her roots in Toronto and casting people and working with people specifically from the comedy community in Toronto,” Lorette says of Pankiw. “That’s how we met.” 

With a background in live performance and improv, Lorette is a complete multi-hyphenate in her real life (as opposed to what you see on Streamberry). She’s in the writers’ room on Mae Martin’s new series Tall Pines, and she created and was the showrunner of Crave in Canada. “I’m a real hodgepodge of different jobs between writing and live performance and acting,” she says. “Like any artist, I try to do a mix of a million things so that I can continue to do this for the rest of my life.”

If you want to see the actual reality of Source Joan that isn’t AI-generated, you can follow Lorette on Instagram at the handle @kaylalorette. “It’s very funny to be doing any work with Black Mirror and talking about things like social media,” she says, laughing. “You’re like, well, this kind of demonic force we all participate in? Yes, you can follow me.”

Black Mirror Season 6 is streaming now.

Additional reporting by Jean Bentley.

Let’s Break Down the Visual Effects of Black Mirror Season 6Have you ever wondered how a nuclear blast is created on-screen? Wonder no more!