If IMDb Awards’ math is to be trusted, prior to this morning, Netflix’s Black Mirror had been nominated for 165 total awards (and won 48), and not a single one of those nods was for a Golden Globe. Like much of the tech in Black Mirror, that’s a bit hard to process — but it’s no longer a problem. On Monday, Black Mirror finally received its first-ever Golden Globes nomination(s) — three in total. (Black Mirror has won six Emmys in 25 nominations.)

Charlie Brooker, the anthology series’ creator, is pumped to check out this whole Golden Globes-ceremony thing (and to not have to pee in a bottle; that will make sense in a bit). In a Zoom conversation from the U.K., Brooker was probably most excited for fellow nominee Paul Giamatti (“a superb actor and just a disgustingly wonderful man”), whose Black Mirror season seven episode “Eulogy” had been overlooked among the 2025 Emmy noms.

Read more from Brooker in The Hollywood Reporter’s Q&A, which covers the former comedy show host’s (real) AI fears and answers if we’re living in a simulation, sort of.

***

Congratulations, it’s good day for you.

It’s a very nice day, because I think this is our first Golden Globe.

It is.

It’s nice, isn’t it? That’s not to be sniffed at. I’ve not been to the Golden Globes before; I don’t know what quite to expect. Somebody said it’s a fun one where you get to sit down at a table and eat and drink during the ceremony and are not starving and wondering if you’re gonna have to urinate in a bottle. I’m sure you could still urinate in a bottle, but it’s probably frowned upon. I guess I’ll find out!

Honestly, if you were gonna pee in a bottle at any major awards show, it’s probably least frowned upon at the Golden Globes.

Really? Thanks — I’ll cite that if I’m caught doing it.

It’s surprising that Black Mirror never got a Golden Globe nomination before.

Well, I mean, thank you. Well, it’s nice. It’s odd because — someone had said to be before, like, “Have you had a Golden Globe before?” And I was like, “No, no I don’t.”

So it is lovely and weird. We’ve been going like 14 years, and obviously, it’s a show where we have to reinvent it with each episode. So it’s sort of — it’s not a proper job, but it is, you know? [Laughs.] I’m not a firefighter or anything, but it’s tough. And so it’s really thrilling to be, you know, recognized at this stage. I’m obviously thrilled for the show overall, and everyone who works on it, because we’ve got a fantastic team who worked really hard. I’m thrilled for Rashida [Jones, who was nominated by the Globes for best actress in a limited/anthology series for the “Common People” episode; she was also nominated for an Emmy]. I’m especially thrilled for Paul Giamatti. [Giamatti was nominated as best actor in a limited/anthology series for “Eulogy.”] I was just kind of disappointed he didn’t get a nom at the Emmys. I felt he deserved one. So I feel like a cosmic injustice has been rectified, because he’s just a superb actor and just a disgustingly wonderful man.

I love it when good things happen to disgustingly wonderful people.

*[Laughs.] *It doesn’t happen enough.

When I was checking up on your prior Globes nominations and wins — or lack thereof — I learned something I probably should have known: You brought us Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan), and you still write on all the specials?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is one of the things that — it’s one of the strange things about Black Mirror in a way that sometimes mystifies — or the success of Black Mirror sometimes — not mystifies, but sometimes wrong-foots people in the U.K. So in the U.K., prior to Black Mirror, I was known for doing comedy stuff. I presented, like, topical comedy shows. And I did a weekly show that was a little like John Oliver’s, something like that. So I was fronting it and we got Diane Morgan in as a character on the show, and she’s a joy to write for, because she can make anything really funny. I swear to God, she makes writing easy because you can write lines for her — she’s just so naturally, got such funny bones. And so she was a regular character on the show, and then we broke her out into her own specials.

That’s been a thrilling sort of stealth mission, like, wait a minute — if the Prime Minister fucking a pig can travel, then maybe Philomena Cunk can too. So, by [Netflix’s] Cunk on Earth, we’d already done Cunk on Shakespeare, we did Cunk on Britain — we’ve done a couple of seasons. And hopefully there will be more to come!

You brought up the series premiere episode [“National Anthem”] of Black Mirror. Did you ever consider a different one to start it all off? It feels so separated from the other themes of the series.

It’s weird, because, in a weird way, every episode is an outlier within the show. It’s an odd one, because actually, the variety of sort of story and tone even that we have is — obviously, it’s all filtered through my brain, but we try to get as much variety within our parameters. And that first one — no, originally, when the show was first commissioned, when I was first writing it, I’d written a completely different story — in fact, a very earnest thing kind of mutated into the episode from season three, called “Man Against Fire.” And there was a new head of Channel Four who came in, Jay Hunt, who sort of looked at the script and went, “I don’t know if this is really right.” And I had a meeting with her where my job was to try and persuade her that we should be able to do this episode, but in my back pocket, as a kind of Hail Mary if she didn’t go for that, I had this idea for the “National Anthem” episode. I didn’t persuade her on the earnest episode, and … absolutely, she was right. She was right, basically.

Out of not really knowing what else to say, I said, “Well, there is this other idea…” And she laughed. And then her first comment was, “Does it have to be a pig?” So we slightly workshopped other things it could be right there and then: “Could it be a wheel of cheese, or, I don’t know, a frozen supermarket chicken?” We were like, “No, it really has to be a pig,” and then I went off and wrote the opening scene, I think, as a sort of proof of concept. And she went for it. Somebody said to me once, it’s like the opening of Saving Private Ryan, in terms of, like, as in terms of how a show would open — as a statement of intent. Hopefully, you’re not going to really be able to predict this show, and you might go away and talk about it and think about it and be kind of agog throughout. It was mission accomplished.

**The main villain across Black Mirror is AI. At this moment in time and at the current pace AI is accelerating, how terrified are you of it?

Ying Yang. There’s two fronts that you’re looking at it. One is the professional end in front of the industry and what it means for creativity. And the other is, are we going to get terminated — is that happening? Do you know Ed Zitron?

I don’t think so.

You should look him up. He’s extremely cynical about LLMs [Large Language Models] and chatbots and stuff like this. He is convinced this is a massive bubble. There’s a lot of that thought going on at the moment that the LLM side of things is a kind of bubble that’s brewing — and how useful are they, really? For somebody who does a show that is worrying out loud a lot of the time about unforeseen consequences of amazing inventions, I can catastrophize with the best of them very quickly. And I can also, sort of think — I can see the value in these things if they’re used correctly as tools, basically. I can see the value in a tool creatively. I can see the value in a tool that a human being is deploying in that way. I can see the value in the tools in Photoshop. It’s when is when people go, “Oh, well, take your hands off the keyboard, walk away” — I don’t see who that’s for.

The thing that worries me about, like AI imagery — you feed the screenplay into it, and it pumps out a whole movie — is a smaller concern than: “Oh God. Society will crumble because we’ll just be flooded with misinformation.” That scares me more on a deeper animal level than the industry things. But the industry stuff worries me too. … I flip-flop between cautious optimism — or at least thinking — “Maybe this is just a big bubble and it’ll all go away,” and thinking, “Oh, we’re fucked.”

Are we living in a simulation?

I think that if we are, it’s not very — it would be more exciting. If we’re living in a simulation, then why does it take me so long to walk around a supermarket or choose different types of margarine or something. Why am I doing that? Why do I have to clip my toenails in the simulation? They explain this in The Matrix, don’t they? They say something like, “We have to make it a bit shit, because otherwise your brain would reject it.” But, why do we have to wipe our bums? Why do we have to do that?

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.