Mr. Robot - Season 2
Rami Malek, left, and Christian Slater star in 'Mr. Robot,' which returns for a second season this summer.
(USA)
"Wouldn't you rather not be spoiled?," asks Sam Esmail, the creator of the "Mr. Robot," the buzziest show of 2015 and the winner of the Golden Globe for best drama Sunday.
The answer was clearly no, as reporter after reporter essentially begged for details about the upcoming second season of the show, about a mentally fractured cybersecurity expert who moonlights as a hacker and becomes involved in a conspiracy to neutralize corporate America -- a plot increasingly mirrored by real-life events, including the Sony hack. (Warning: Spoilers for the first season will follow.)
Esmail was born in Hoboken and grew up in South Carolina and Sewell, N.J., in Gloucester County's Washington Township, which is also where Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), the psychologically fragile hacker of "Mr. Robot," grew up and where some of the action takes place.
At the end of the first season, in an unabashedly "Fight Club"-inspired twist, Elliot realizes that the man known as Mr. Robot (Christian Slater, who also won a Golden Globe Sunday for best supporting actor) who drew him into the conspiracy is his father. His dead father. That only he can see.
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Esmail tells television critics at their winter press tour here that the second season, which premieres this summer, will be about Elliot's struggle to reconcile this fantasy with reality, and there will be much more backstory. "The series is filling in the blanks in the past and the present and even the future. You're this close to the painting and you step back and you see more of it, and you take a step back and you see more of it. That's how I'm approaching each season."
When asked whether there were any other elements from the first season that will turn out to be an illusion, Esmail refused to elaborate beyond a curt "yes."
"I want to say true to Elliot. I'm not interested in 'gotcha' moments or trying to shock the audience. I think that really happens because Rami brilliantly plays Elliot in a way that draws you into his psyche, so you're learning with him. As long as that feels real, I think the twists will come from there."
But will there be more twists? Esmail, who said he's halfway through writing the second season: "Probably. If I were a betting man, I'd say yes." One thing he was definite about: B.D. Wong, who played an extremely memorable uber-hacker in the first season, will return. "But I do have to use him sparingly because his character has such a great mystery around him."
Slater had his suspicions about his character when he read the pilot. "I said to my agent, 'Do you think that guy's really there?' My agent is like, 'C'mon, they'd never do that. They call it "Mr. Robot." That'd be crazy.'"
And Malek says it was hard to keep the secret on set, particularly when Slater appeared in scenes with Malek, but only Malek could interact with him. "It's very difficult on set, to tell the other actors, 'Just try not to look at him.' People get suspicious."
Esmail also talked about how he achieved the verisimilitude of the outsider computer culture when so many other films and television shows fail in that respect. "Girls rejected me a lot," he says, to big laugh. (He's now engaged to "Shameless" star Emmy Rossum.)
Growing up, he spent a lot of time on the computer, at the library and watching films. "I used to hold Stanley Kubrick film festivals at my house in high school. These are not cool things. Back in my day, those are things that you would get beaten up for." And he did. "When you're a funny-looking Egyptian growing up in Jersey and South Carolina, it kind of gets rough."
USA also announced a third season of "Playing House," the comedy about a woman helping raise her best friend's newborn, and has ordered to series a new drama called "Falling Water," from "The Walking Dead" producer Gale Anne Hurd, Blake Masters ("Brotherhood") and the late Henry Bromell ("Homeland"). It's about three people who are dreaming separate parts of a common dream that may hold the fate to humanity. Because if it were eight people, it might be Netflix's "Sens8."
Vicki Hyman may be reached at vhyman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @vickihy or like her on Facebook. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook, and check out TV Hangover, the podcast from Vicki Hyman and co-host Erin Medley on iTunes, Stitcher or listen here.