Charlie Brooker is preparing his next project for Netflix – a mockumentary about 2020. The mind behind dystopian anthology TV show Black Mirror, Brooker seems like the best person for the job of turning the year of the pandemic into televised entertainment.
Hugh Grant will feature in the series – in fact, he was the one who let news of the project slip in an interview with New York magazine. The actor said he’s playing a “repellent” historian with a wig, but that’s about all we know so far. His last role was Nicole Kidman’s deceitful husband in HBO limited series The Undoing, so this will be a change of pace for Grant.
This won’t be Brooker’s first current affairs rodeo – the former journalist previously hosted the Annual Wip, a darkly comic look back at the events of the previous 12 months, so he’s well-versed in end-of-year reflections. The show ran on BBC between 2006 and 2016, but he stopped to focus on other commitments – namely Black Mirror.
He also hosted a 45-minute special, Charlie Brooker’s Antiviral Wipe, for BBC Two earlier this year, which focused on the news coverage and public reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Black Mirror season 5, the last instalment of the dystopian series in 2019, featured big names like Miley Cyrus, Anthony Mackie and Andrew Scott, so we have high hopes for the cast of Brooker’s new project.
