We went back and we reshot Rupert sitting on the bed with a strained and strange expression on his face as he listens to the actual voice of this new character.

After the election we decided to turn him into not only a creator of fake news but also an online and on-air personality.

He was more of a James O’Keefe figure beforehand, and more of an Alex Jones figure after the election. We always had the idea that the behind-the-scenes character would find Elizabeth Keane’s Achilles’ heel, which was the memory and love of her son. We turned him into somebody who could verbally attack her on air. And it was really fun to write those rants, I have to say.

The entire idea of a propaganda boiler room was always part of the story, but it assumed a much more prominent place as the election happened, and then as the revelations came out during the transition period. And that’s, interestingly enough, when we all sat up a little straighter in the story room. Because we found ourselves in this sort of privileged position of being able to comment on what was actually happening contemporaneously in the world, and that felt energizing to us as storytellers.

The detail about Dar’s background with Quinn, which some of us interpreted as some kind of predatory sexual behavior, was that always there from the start?

Well, you know, it was intimated at the end of last season, too. In that scene where Quinn was comatose, and Carrie and Dar were having a conversation by his bedside about how Quinn was originally recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency. But I really prefer to interpret those scenes in a slightly different way. There may have been some predatory behavior, but whether there were actual sexual acts that took place – look, that’s up for interpretation.