With the use of Easter eggs in Mr. Robot there’s a whole other layer of challenges as the viewer is trying to work out… do these things exist in the reality of the show or just in Elliot’s head?

Sure, we think about that a lot. We are always thinking about through whose eyes are you seeing what we’re showing you, and we don’t always reveal that truth about who’s voice it is. It’s an unknown entity you can interpret in various ways. When we started a lot of people assumed it was Mr. Robot, then fsociety, we purposely don’t state whose perspective you’re seeing things from. E Corp has a website online and email addresses and we’ve had to build all of those things out. So E Corp has a homepage that is continually under maintenance but if type in www.e-corp-usa.com then the page looks one way but if you type in www.evil-corp-usa.com then the whole page looks darker and more sinister which is how Elliot would see it, again, we’re trying to keep to a set of rules that we’ve established that this is all happening in the universe of the show so we can’t contradict any of our rules.

If you look at the very best genre entertainment, right, you know Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and so on, the very best ones, they all have one thing in common they come up with a world or universe and they establish a really clear set of rules and they play around as much as they can, and subvert your expectations as much as they can while trying not to break those rules. Sam does that incredibly well; he’s created a universe. Things will happen in season 3 or season 4 that pick up a thread you think is long abandoned and has been there since season 1 but Sam knows exactly where he’s going. So we make sure that everything works within this universe that he’s so brilliantly created. That’s a lot of work but it’s really gratifying and fun and when you run into something like the time difference where it initially seems like it’s a hurdle, it just leads to something even cooler as you’re forced to think around it, we need to find the most creative way to stay within that world.

I read, with regards to Mr. Robot and keeping it real in terms of hacking that if something can’t be done in the real world it won’t be included in the show?

Right, I don’t want to speak for the core of the show too much, but if they’re depicting something in the show a tremendous amount of research has been done to make sure it’s a legit thing. We can sometimes be slightly more magical with some of the stuff we do online… you might be able to access a site that technically you wouldn’t have permission to access for example. Maybe you can get to a page on E Corp’s website that in reality a member of the public wouldn’t get to, right. Things we always make sure of are things like we wouldn’t have a later version of Windows on a page if it should be Windows 95 or something, those are things we make sure we don’t get wrong, it has to feel authentic and that it’s tracking true.