‘Mr. Robot’ NYCC Reunion: How Creator Sam Esmail Was Pitched Darlene & Leon Spinoff By A Hacker
Thanks to streaming, old shows like Will & Grace, Frasier and Dexter are getting more than nine lives. However, when it comes to more Mr. Robot, creator Sam Esmail told the rabid fans at New York Comic-Con that the book is closed.
When asked by moderator and podcast host Josh Horowitz if there were would ever be a spinoff, Esmail took a tangent to answer the question, but wound up at the point.
He shared how there was an attempted hack on him recently; essentially the Mr Robot series creator and filmmaker playing along with what was an orchestrated prank call. However, in the end, it wound up being a Mr. Robot fan. After going back and forth, and the jig being up, Esmail asked the guy, “What’s this all about?”
The guy at the other end of the line confessed, “Dude, I just really want season of Carly Chaiken (who played Darlene, Elliot’s sister) and Joey Bada$$ (Leon) — can you do that spinoff?”
To which Esmail turned to the backed Main Stage audience at Javits Center and said, “I would love nothing more than to go back into the Mr. Robot world.”
“But we told that story and ended it in a really great way,” said Esmail.
Onstage with stars Christian Slater and Rami Malek, whose career went off like a rocketship with the show, from being an Emmy Best Actor Drama Winner to ultimate Best Actor Oscar Winner for Bohemian Rhapsody, Esmail and the gang gave several shoutouts to former USA Networks boss Bonnie Hammer in the audience for having the guts to roll the dice on the series. Esmail, inspired by the David Fincher 1999 movie Fight Club, went all political in the show.
Mr. Robot followed Elliot Alderson, a dark web hacker whose pursuit was to take down a big GE-like New York City conglomerate, the nefarious E-corp. He’s haunted by a guy, who at first seems like a mentor, Mr. Robot (Slater). We come to learn in Elliot’s crusade that he’s suffering from a dissociative identity disorder.
“I’m going all anticapitalist and anti-corporate and I thought someone is going to finance and market this, and sure enough they did!.” The creator spoke about how Mr. Robot was originally conceived as a movie, but he wrote long and then it became a series. He was inspired by the 2008 recession and the Arab Spring.
“The world felt like it was in a crisis — how naive I was back then to think that was what a crisis was like,” said Email in a nod to the current vitriol political times stateside.
But would the show get made today?
“Are you kidding? Honestly, it like the show wasn’t nearly as f*cked up as it it would be today!,” exclaimed Esmail. “It’s like Pleasantville, now.”
The trio looked back at the wonder of making the show ten years ago: production schedules that lasted one week, the renegade notion of shooting a show while it was still airing on TV, and finding the exact right black hoodie for Malek. It was the actor who found the ultimate pull-over for his outcast hacker — in a thrift store for $10. Malek wound up gifting Esmail the hoodie, which remains framed in the creator’s home.
It’s been ten years since the series premiered on USA Networks, and it’s close to six years since the fourth season wrapped on Dec. 22, 2019.
