'Mr. Robot' Star Portia Doubleday Knows Too Much
Ever since its premiere, Mr. Robot has been rightfully hailed as one of the best character studies on television, presenting its dizzyingly smart and ambitious techno-thriller story through the unreliable mind of Elliot (Rami Malek), a vigilante hacker determined to right society’s wrongs by any means necessary. But the character who has evolved the most over the show’s three seasons - radically transformed, in fact - is Portia Doubleday’s Angela, who in the current third season emerges as a compelling mirror image to Elliot, reflecting both his single-minded pursuit of justice and his mental fragility.
Introduced as a seemingly meek wallflower, a low-level employee at the same cyber-security firm as Elliot, Angela rapidly revealed a core of pure steel which has transformed her into one of the show’s most conflicted anti-heroes. Elliot and Angela want justice for their father and mother respectively, who both died young thanks to a toxic chemical leak caused by E-Corp. But while Elliot - and his reckless alternate personality, Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) - fight back from the outside with a world-altering hack, Angela quietly nets herself a cutthroat corporate job in the belly of the beast and works to disrupt E-Corp from the inside. And though she’s succeeded, it’s increasingly unclear whether Angela will come out on the other side of all this, and what will be left of her if she does.
Following her mysterious encounter with Whiterose (B.D. Wong) in last season’s penultimate episode, during which some crucial and as-yet-unknown information was shared, Angela is reborn. She’s a zealot. She believes in Whiterose. She seems to believe, in fact, that Whiterose has the ability to raise the dead, or turn back time, or possibly both. And that conviction has driven her to horrific extremes in Season 3: betraying Elliot by exploiting his mental illness, working directly with Mr. Robot to carry out the next violent stage of the hack, and, in a devastating mid-season twist, indirectly aiding in the killing of thousands of people by helping facilitate a series of 71 coordinated bombings on E-Corp buildings. “I don’t know how you come back from that,” Doubleday tells BAZAAR.com as we discuss her extraordinary season, Angela’s slow psychological breakdown, and Mr. Robot’s nuanced depiction of workplace sexual harassment.
When this season premiere revealed that Angela was working with Mr. Robot behind Elliot’s back, I actually gasped. It felt like such a huge betrayal, although it’s now been dwarfed by the E-Corp bombings. What was your reaction?
When Sam and I first had this conversation about what Angela would be this season, I was intimidated by it. It was such a stretch. Especially what happens with the E-Corp buildings. I just said to him, how are you ever going to forgive this character? I don’t know how she’s ever going to come back from that, especially because Angela really isn’t a villain. We talked a lot about what her psychological process is after that moment.
"Angela is power-hungry. She wants power, and respect, and justice, and is willing to do whatever it takes to attain that. I find that to be a pretty androgynous motive, but it’s what we see men do all the time."
We still haven’t found out what Whiterose told Angela in their conversation, which is what’s driving her to do all of this. Do you know?
I still don’t know fully, but Sam did tell me enough, and it definitely threw me. He said okay, don't tell anyone, but this is why you’re doing all this. It was really not what I was expecting - although “the unexpected” is exactly what you should expect from Sam Esmail. I find a lot of these characters to be pretty narcissistic, in that they’re very involved with their own motives, and what I’ll say is that what Angela was told would not only benefit her. She knows Elliot isn’t going to understand, though she desperately wants to tell him, and ultimately she belives that what she’s doing is for the greater good, for both of them. And for everyone. Sam had to keep instilling that conviction in me, because I had doubts about selling that, I guess. Selling a person that was this compromised, and having it be realistic.
I guess the upside of Angela betraying Elliot is that you get to work with Christian Slater now, who had really only played scenes with Rami up until this season. How was that?
I was so excited, I was fanning out - I took a picture in our first scene together. I remember being startled because Christian’s a teddy bear, and when we started working together, the level of intensity that he brings took me aback. Robot’s a very unpredictable, scary character, and I had to constantly keep reminding myself you’re looking at Elliot, you’re looking at Elliot, which brings a level of absurdity to it. I definitely laughed in a couple of takes that did not warrant humor. There's something so odd about having a relationship with somebody that is weirdly in your friend's body.
Robot is a much scarier character to me this season. When he grabs Angela so violently in her apartment, in the premiere, it’s very jarring.
Yeah, I remember I was shocked in that scene because I don’t expect that from Christian, which worked, because Angela also would never have expected that from Elliot. Christian's amazing, and so lovely and charismatic and cracks jokes, and then will flip into this kind of intensity. I could feel that viscerally when I was next to him [in scenes], I felt an unpredictability about him, which is always fun. It keeps you on your toes and really engaged with the other actor.
Angela keeps clinging to this belief that “no-one’s going to die” in the E-Corp bombings, and when the opposite happens and thousands are killed, she slips into a delusional state. Mental illness has always played a major role in Mr. Robot, but as a new facet for you, how did you approach it?
Again, I was intimidated, because it’s really easy to fall into a stereotype, the "oh, now she’s crazy" stereotype. I wouldn’t have had the courage to take Angela to those places without Sam, but because I had him and I trust him to help me avoid the stereotype... . I was very, very affected by that episode personally. When Sam told me, I was like, "Wait, how many buildings? How many people?" Just internalizing what that means, it's not really something I think you can comprehend. It becomes a little bit delusional in itself because you literally cannot comprehend that level of guilt. Something in you has to snap for you to be able to cope. From the second I got those scripts, I knew this was a place I was going to have to thoroughly examine - what is actually the visceral experience of doing something like that, that level of trauma, and how your body responds. In the finale, you definitely see how much it's affected Angela. I’m interested to see what Sam does next season, because I don’t know how you recover.
"In the finale, you definitely see how much it's affected Angela. I’m interested to see what Sam does next season, because I don’t know how you recover."
Episode 5 is this remarkable, ambitious one-shot episode which follows Rami for the first half, and you for the second. Were you daunted by the technical challenge of that?
I remember Rami saying that to me, because it takes me a while to take everything in when we're prepping, and I don’t think I quite knew what to expect. It feels like a completely different medium, almost like you’re in a video game, or like theater where every reaction you have can be so organic. It’s a complete departure from the day-to-day. That crane shot where I’m running, we did 27 takes, and on one of the takes, I stepped out of frame and so we had to do the whole thing again. The level of precision and the level of concentration you have to have - memorizing the cues and right hand here, the camera's gonna be here at that moment, make sure you bend down at this moment, your right hand, left hand, here's your parameters, don't walk out of frame - that was really complicated. If I had known, I probably would have been a lot more nervous before coming to set!
Workplace sexism has played a huge role in Angela’s arc from the beginning. The first time we see her at Allsafe, she's being undermined in a meeting by an older man, and later in the season she’s sexually harassed. The fact that she’s evolved into this power player feels so resonant right now.
Oh my gosh, I remember [during Season 1] talking to all of my friends who had dealt with sexual harassment or sexism at work. One of my friends is a lawyer, and her boss told her, "You're too serious, you come off like a bitch, and because you come off that way, you're going to lose your cases." There’s such a normalization of that stereotype, if you’re a woman who works really hard and your tone is not warm or you don’t smile enough, you don’t act feminine enough, then you're “a bitch.” I love that Sam focused on that with Angela, and that he showed what happened to her as a result of her interaction with Terry Colby. When I originally read the audition breakdown for this part - Sam didn't write this - it was literally "Possible romantic interest/best friend of Elliot. Also works at E-Corp." I just thought, "Wow, that has nothing to do with who this person is. Absolutely nothing."
Angela is power-hungry. She wants power, and respect, and justice, and is willing to do whatever it takes to attain that, and I find that to be a pretty androgynous motive. But it’s what we see men do all the time. Angela is not interested in getting married and being a Cinderella who gets saved. It’s very clear, in that first episode, when she goes up to Elliot after he defends her in that meeting and says, "Do not save me. I can do this on my own.” When I read that first script, that moment was such a breath of fresh air.
[loop src='https://hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/videos/hbz-portia-doubleday-by-tyler-joe-008-1512583967.mp4' align='center' size='medium' caption=''][/loop]That flashback in Episode 9, when you see Angela at Allsafe again being patronized by men, was such a powerful reminder of where she started from.
She's come a long way. Every season it feels like there’s a pretty big transformation for her, which is the biggest luxury I could ask for as an actress. It’s not a surface supporting character, you really get to see the innards. When Angela was doing those positive affirmations to herself in Season 2, I was elated, because that told me so much about who she was, and really deeply what makes this person tick. That need for control, the way she has to control her thoughts in order to be okay. And that all played perfectly into her meeting with Whiterose. Through Angela’s own self-inflicted brainwashing in the second season, she was just in a perfect position to be manipulated by Whiterose this season. The complexity of the character is such a breath of fresh air with what's going on in the world today. I'm very happy to be playing Angela right now.
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