It turns out the man behind the most socially anxious, self-medicating loner on television is kind of a people person.
Wandering through Chinatown — the neighborhood in which Mr. Robot’s Elliot Alderson lives — the actor who plays him, Rami Malek, has taken it upon himself to defy the unspoken no-eye-contact rule of the New York City sidewalk on this sweltering August afternoon. Mid-photoshoot, he’s decided to approach various passersby and extend his hand.
Some people recognize him and light up — teenagers who stop for a photo, a man who yells his love for USA’s surprise summer hit across the park — while others are bemusedly charmed by this lanky, enthusiastic man with a camera in tow who just wants to say hi.
It’s a nod, Malek says, to his nickname on set, "The Mayor” — which, if you’ve surrendered to the addictively bleak Mr. Robot, is an indicator of all sorts of extroversion that takes a beat to reconcile with the isolated character he plays on the show. Malek may be everyone’s new favorite introvert on TV, but in person, he’s a lot more at home in his own skin.
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Mr. Robot is, like fellow summer standout Unreal on Lifetime, a dark blossom of a show on a cable network known for lighter fare. While it’s a drama set in the present day, it has a sci-fi spirit. Its creator, Sam Esmail, is a newcomer with only an indie romance, 2014’s Comet, under his belt. Its most famous cast member is Christian Slater, who plays the title character, but most of the story is carried by less familiar but no less interesting talents, including Portia Doubleday, Suburgatory’s Carly Chaikin, Swedish actor Martin Wallström, and, of course, Malek. It's been a critical hit and a change of pace for USA, a channel known for successful comfort food dramedies like Suits and Royal Pains and for the perky slogan "Characters Welcome."
But there's nothing cutesy or quirky about Elliot, a cybersecurity technician who has a taste for morphine and hacking everyone in his life, from his childhood friend to his court-mandated therapist, peeking into their private accounts for all the secrets they don't care to share. He likes to play vigilante in his spare time, a tendency that’s escalated as he’s gotten drawn into fsociety, an Anonymous-style hacktivist group that aims to erase the credit record and isn’t afraid of getting rough. He's intensely lonely. He’s not affecting awkwardness, he says the wrong thing often, and more often than that, he doesn’t say anything at all.
Cait Oppermann for BuzzFeed News
Except to us. Elliot unleashes his alienation on the audience in a fourth-wall-breaking voiceover that turns the viewer into his imaginary friend and closest confidant. And while the iron grip he’s had on the story has started to loosen, he’s been an all-consuming but unreliable narrator, the full extent of which we're only starting to understand as Mr. Robot’s first season comes to a close. Things are largely funneled through his point of view, i.e. every time someone mentions the conglomerate Elliot blames for his father’s death, we hear his nickname for it instead — Evil Corp.
The instability of Mr. Robot’s subjective universe has only increased (spoilers ahead, for anyone not caught up) as the season has gone on, until, in the penultimate episode, it was revealed what many of us suspected all along: That mysterious, erratic head of fsociety, played by Slater? He doesn’t exist. He’s never existed, not in the form in which we’ve known him. He’s a delusion who looks like Elliot’s dad and who dwells only in Elliot’s head.
Elliot has been Mr. Robot all along.
Malek isn’t in on every detail of the show’s plan — USA renewed Mr. Robot for a second season before the series premiered — but this is an unveiling he’s known would be coming from the start. He’s aware that it’s the sort of development that requires a leap of faith, even in a series that, from the beginning, established Elliot as paranoid, unstable, and uncertain about the truth. He’s maybe even been a little nervous about it.
“I have to remind myself always that it's a tightrope with him. One episode, you probably want to kill him. And the next episode, I'm sure you feel for this guy,” Malek says later, sitting in the gratifyingly air-conditioned Silk Road Cafe on Mott Street. Elliot may sometimes traipse into the morally questionable ter