Will Mr. Robot Have a Happy Ending?

Sam Esmail: Mr Robot was never about “Capitalism: Is it good or bad?” or “How can we fix the world economy?” or “How can we fix the geopolitical nature of money?” This was about wanting to connect and not being able to connect. When you got to season three, I felt like Elliot was the thinker and Mr. Robot was the muscle. Now we’re in season four and Mr. Robot is doing things that Elliot might otherwise do and vice versa. We’re starting to see the two of them meld together into this one person because, in fact, they are. Season four kicks off with Angela’s violent murder, and Elliot has become unhinged in a way. He’s just out for vengeance. He’s gonna be like what Mr. Robot was like in the first season. Of course, Mr. Robot, throughout the last three seasons, has seen the consequences of that aggression, so now he’s taken a step back and has become more like Elliot.

Sam Esmail: The thing about Elliot is, he can be obnoxious. He’s very angry at the world. He names his hacker group “Fuck Society.” It’s a very delicate thing for an audience member to watch a character like that, week in and week out, and be able to root for them. The thing that Rami allowed me to do as a writer and director is that no matter how difficult Elliot became, no matter how inaccessible I wrote him, or no matter how closed off he needed to be, Rami found a way to add that vulnerability. Mr. Robot can get complicated, Rami has that gift of being able to ground it. I mean, we’re inside the guy’s head. We don’t even know what’s real or what’s fantasy, and Rami was able to always walk that tightrope and make us be with him, whether or not we understood what was going on around him.

-Matt Zoller Seitz: The paranoid thriller is one of your favorite genres. One point of disagreement between us is that I believe it can’t be a true paranoid thriller if it has a happy ending. But I’m looking at season four and it really seems like you want hope to come out of this. I can’t picture you leaving the viewer feeling completely shattered.

-Sam Esmail: I always think about the Three Days of the Condor ending, which is very haunting, right? To some people, it’s clear-cut: The system has won, it will always win. Or maybe not. Maybe you have that optimistic point of view that Robert Redford is gonna figure out a way and the press is gonna blow this thing wide open. I love endings where you can choose. But the thing about the paranoid thriller is it’s always man versus the system, and the system in our real lives continues on. Source: www.vulture.com

To prepare for Mr. Robot, Rami Malek learned about cybersecurity and read textbooks on schizophrenia and took typing lessons for hacker verisimilitude and found a psychologist who assigned him homework. “There were times when I would go to Sam and say, ‘This doesn't quite match up for me,’ and I would have a reason why the psychology didn't feel accurate, and I would reference some book on dissociative disorder by Elyn Saks,” Malek says. Instead of being annoyed at Malek's conspicuous overachieving, Esmail hired the psychologist onto the show as a consultant.

Rami Malek Gets Lucy Boynton's Support at 'Mr. Robot' Final Season Premiere on Tuesday (October 1) in New York City. The pair turned the star-studded affair into a stylish date night, with Malek rocking a flawlessly tailored pinstripe suit with a black-and-white patterned button-down. Meanwhile, Boynton looked chic in a black dress, with ruffled collar, which she wore with a pair of strappy black shoes.

Their sweet red-carpet outing was perfectly memorialized in a beaming snapshot of the pair, standing below the theater marquee which read "Mr. Robot. The final season. Goodbye, friend." “People's perception might be altered,” Malek says, in the wake of his Bohemian Rhapsody Oscar win, “but when you sit down and talk to me, there's nothing that's mystifying. I'm not fucking covered in gold.”