Cristin Milioti felt like she had been inside a martini shaker after filming scenes in “USS Callister: Into Infinity.”
“It was a lot like falling out of a hospital bed,” she explains. “It was very physical … but I like that.”
In the latest edition of the Emmy-winning “Black Mirror” installment, she had intense stunts and action sequences on a couple of levels. “I can run and stuff but I’m not a trained stunt person,” Milioti says. The stunt coordinator “was very helpful at choreographing it based on our skill level.”
One scene, for example, took three hours of rehearsal. The result? An amazing display of action on screen.
In the sequel, Milioti returns as Nanette Cole, a programmer who has volunteered to track rogue players in an immersive virtual reality-based game. Because it exists on several levels, the story required her to play a clone as well as the original character. For newcomers, it may sound confusing, but the original paid homage to “Star Trek,” video games and the cultures that surround them.
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When the original was released in 2017, it was hailed as a crowning achievement of “Black Mirror” and a likely candidate for reboot. A series was pondered but the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike derailed the idea, and the plot was reworked for “Into Infinity.”
Going back to the ship, Milioti says, was “really trippy. It was so cool, but I did feel like I was in an active déjà vu simulation.”
Sets were eerily similar, according to co-star Jimmi Simpson. “You don’t ever have that. You also don’t have (time freezing). We’re all just the same people, just eight years later.”
The new edition emphasizes further developments in the gaming world and points a finger at tech billionaires “who are making huge choices that negatively impact the rest of the world, solely for greed or an ego pet,” Simpson says.
Both actors got to play a variety of emotions as their real/clone characters. Simpson likens it to therapy. His character, he says, discovers he’s fallible “and he’s being crushed from a force that is more powerful than him for the first time. That’s when he has realized, ‘Oh, god, I’m deeply flawed.’ He’s getting a sense that that connection is what life is about.”
The story within a story, Milioti says, gave writer Charlie Brooker a chance to comment on reality television before characters blow someone apart. “It reflects the callousness that can be within anonymity online,” she says. “Or like these tech billionaires who are making these choices that affect millions and millions of people and they have no thought about it. I like how he mines the humor in that with this.”
Director Toby Hayne‘s energy, Simpson says, “helped us feel like (we were at) summer camp. There’s a very childlike, almost counselor quality to him.”
If he said, “Go jump in the lake,” Simpson says, “we’d go jump in the lake. It keeps us feeling young and off balance.”
At the end of the first film, Milioti’s character had power and confidence. “She’s discovered this new reserve within herself.” In the new edition, “she’s at her wits’ end and she’s really bad at this job. She’s retreating more and more into herself and becoming more and more meek.”
The virtual world version, however, “is constantly ready for something to burst through the wall.”
The film was fun, Simpson says, even though the actors were playing “our worst traits come to life.”
That dual-identity premise worked, he adds, because the two had chemistry. “We share a caffeine dependency and a love of theater and we kind of just let it happen.”
"USS Callister: Into Infinity" airs on Netflix.
