Black Mirror season seven actress Rosy McEwen, who played Verity in Bête Noire, has detailed her experience of working on the show and how its creator Charlie Brooker demystified some confusing plot points for her.

Black Mirror wouldn’t be the show we know and love without some mind-boggling confusion, and season seven is no different. We’ve got alternate realities, walks down memory lane, multiple versions of the same episode being filmed, and who the hell drank Luisa’s milk in Bête Noire?

Speaking of Bête Noire, it was undoubtedly one of the more jarring episodes in the season. Little nuggets of confusion were dropped throughout the episode, and it wasn’t until the final few scenes that we saw the big technological twist, quantum mechanics and alternate realities.

We viewers weren’t the only ones to find the episode baffling, with Verity actress Rosy McEwen also finding it difficult to grapple with, that is, until Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker uttered these five genius words.

Verity’s actress went deep on her Bête Noire prep

Bête Noire, which basically means a person or thing that someone particularly dislikes, follows Verity’s quest to get back at her childhood bullies after they started a rumour that she had slept with a teacher. So, how does she get her own back? Silly pranks? Get them fired? Outright murder? All of the above and then some.

Though it’s never fully explained, Verity used her big brain to build a quantum computer that allowed her to move between alternate realities depending on what she wanted to happen. For instance, by saying “I enrolled in a catering course at Oxford Brookes” while touching her remote pendant, Verity can rewrite reality so she actually did that.

After reading the script for the episode, Rosy McEwen and her co-star Siena Kelly tried to make sense of the plot by analysing the motives and thoughts of their respective characters.

“Well, interestingly enough, when we first got into rehearsals, me and Sienna were asking all these really in-depth questions about the character,” Rosy recently told The Hollywood Reporter.

“We had our notebooks, and we were like, ‘Yeah, but why? What do they mean? What was said at school?’ We were trying to get all these details in, and both of us were slightly struggling to get our heads around who these people were and the intensity of what ends up happening. How do they get from the A to B? Maybe they’re really good people, and they’re just trying their best.”

But that’s when Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker stepped in to quell confusion with just five words: “No, they’re just really petty.”

Rosy continued: “And that just released everything for both of us. We were like, ‘Ohhhhhhh, so this is all completely playing off a ridiculous quality that all of us, as humans, [have].’ We can’t help that we all have these feelings, but we wouldn’t buy into them as much, whereas Verity just buys into her pettiness like nothing else.

“That’s probably the beauty of these episodes, it starts very human, but the ridiculousness the world’s come to… It should be laughed at. It should be labelled as ridiculous and one step too far.”

See, being petty does pay off in the long run?