Dallas Native Robbie Tann Stars in Black Mirror, and It's as Crazy as You Think

If you haven't binged the new season of Black Mirror, congratulations on your self-control — or else, sorry you have to work two jobs and haven't had the time. But seemingly everyone else has watched the recent episodes of the Netflix show including “Mazey Day,” in which the titular character is sent to a rehabilitation facility. While Day attempts to take a quiet hiatus, a sly group of paparazzi is able to track her down, intending to snap a photo of her “looking like a junkie.” The photographer who is able to get a picture of Day is promised anywhere between $30,000 and $40,000, depending on her state of messiness.

One of these photographers is the deceitful Whitty, who is played by Dallas native Robbie Tann. In “Mazey Day,” Whitty comes up with clever ways to interfere with Bo (Zazie Beetz) getting the shot.

In real life, Tann is a Hollywood hopeful who despises paparazzi culture.

“The way that they treat women, it's like, they just dig into their lives to rip them apart and build them up and tear them down,” Tann says. “It was hard to kind of be in the shoes of this character. Every time I was on set, I had to get into a frame of mind that was far from who I am. But I felt that I needed to really get there in order to serve the story.”

It’s no surprise Tann was able to play a character so different from himself. Having received training from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas (where he graduated in 2005), he is among an elite group of actors.

Tann says he mostly played sports “up until the ninth grade,” but caught the bug for performing after attending a production of The Phantom Of The Opera with his grandmother. When he began school at Booker T, Tann initially enrolled in the school’s music program, where he was in the jazz ensemble and show choir.

When his show choir put on a production of Into the Woods, Tann decided he would rather shift his focus from singing to acting.

Over the years, Tann has performed on various stages nationwide, including the Long Wharf Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and New Victory Theater. He has also had guest and recurring spots on shows Orange Is the New Black, FBI and Mare Of Eastown. But auditioning for the Black Mirror spot — with very little background info regarding the episode’s overall narrative — tested his acting chops.

“The audition process was very bare bones in terms of what I knew,” Tann says. "I knew I was going to be auditioning for Black Mirror, and I got a scene from Black Mirror, but I had zero other context. I didn't get a script, they didn't tell me what the episode was about, and I had to sign an NDA even to get the audition. When you audition a lot of times, as actors, you don't get to see [everything] because they're trying to hide the twist. So you just have to guess what they're kind of looking for, what the tone is going to be like.”

Much is also left to the viewers’ interpretation in the episode itself. The presence of an iPod Shuffle, computers with Windows XP and the announcement of Suri Cruise’s birth suggest the story takes place in the early to mid-aughts, which Tann believes was the height of paparazzi culture. “That was an inflection point for us as a society,” Tann says. ”That was a moment that we could have decided ‘We're not going to do this thing.’ Paparazzi culture and celebrity culture are this symbiotic toxic thing, and I think that’s what the message of the episode is. It's terrifying that we didn't fix it then.”

“Mazey Day,” along with shows like The Idol, are part of the fallen starlet industrial complex narrative we’ve seen in recent programming. And in this day and age, with social platforms like DeuxMoi, TMZ and the blind-item subcommunity of TikTok, it doesn’t appear that we, as a society, have learned anything from the detrimental effects of gossip culture.

This September, Tann will star in The Creator, a post-apocalyptic film detailing a future that came as a result of a war between humans and artificial intelligence.

“Everyone was putting their heart on their sleeve for this film,” says Tann, “and I really feel like that is going to shine through.”

Had you asked Tann a decade ago if he planned to go from being a stage actor to a screen actor, he would’ve said no. However, about five or six years ago, he realized that both kinds of acting offer various artistic components that he gets to tap into with every project.

“It's so different to perform on a stage; it's very much like about the athleticism of it,” Tann says. “And to be on TV and film, it helps me develop a real sense of vulnerability because it's not all about performance, it's about letting yourself into the scene.”