SPECIAL THANKS TO KATE HUNTER AND WILL TAYLOR AT NETFLIX

Besides San Junipero, there hasn’t quite been an episode of Black Mirror that is specifically tailored towards the gays like Joan is Awful. (Spoilers incoming, btw.) The season six premiere stars A Little Bit Alexis singer-songwriter Annie Murphy as the titular Joan, a downbeat tech CEO who discovers that her entire life has been dramatised on the Netflix-esque streaming service Streamberry – in real-time, we should add – and that she’s being played by “Salma fucking Hayek”. 

From Joan taking a shit in the middle of a church in a cheerleader costume with a dick drawn on her forehead to Joan and Salma’s “quamputer” rampage, Joan is Awful is the campest episode in Black Mirror’s history. Annie tells GAY TIMES that she didn’t grasp the episode’s queer appeal until she and Salma attended a Trixie Mattel-hosted screening that was swarming with “very excited, very loud and very involved gays”. 

“Salma and I sat in the back in the dark, in the last row, and just held each other’s hand because we didn’t realise… Like, we knew it was a fun, good episode, but then hearing these genuine gasps and cackles… Salma got a standing ovation at one point,” says Annie. “It felt so nice to have it out in the world. It was a really special night.” 

Here, Annie Murphy discusses the “twists and turns” of Joan is Awful, her and Salma’s plans to star in a buddy comedy and the “exact moment” she realised her status as a gay fan-favourite. Obviously, we had to interrogate the Schitt’s Creek icon about the whereabouts of the music video to her Grammy Award-winning dance-pop anthem A Little Bit Alexis. (We might have to start a change.org petition.) 

Annie, honestly, where do I start with Joan is Awful? I watched the episode today and I was blown away. I was flabbergasted. It’s genius.

Yay! That makes me so happy to hear. I mean, I’m with you. I shot it for six weeks, I’ve read the script so many times, I’ve seen it now three or four times and I’m still a little bit scrambled by what the content is and all of the twists and turns.

Once it got to the end and it was revealed that “Annie Murphy” was, y’know, I can’t…

I can’t. I read that, closed the script, got up and walked around my apartment like, ‘No no no. Nope! There must be some mistake. I don’t know what to do in this situation.’ It felt like another episode of Black Mirror. It really did. It felt so surreal.