Mr. Robot is an American drama-thriller television series created by Sam Esmail.
It stars Rami Malek as Elliot Alderson, a cyber-security engineer and hacker who suffers
from social anxiety disorder and clinical depression.
Alderson is recruited by an insurrectionary anarchist known as "Mr. Robot", played by
Christian Slater, to join a group of hacktivists called "fsociety".The group aims to destroy
all debt records by encrypting the financial data of the largest conglomerate in the world,
E Corp.
Mr. Robot has received critical acclaim and has been nominated for and won multiple awards,
including the Golden Globe for Best Television Drama Series and was recognized with a Peabody Award.
In 2016, the series received six Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series with Malek
winning for OUstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series
here are 69 facts about mr robot you SHOULD know
The pilot's title "Hello Friend" is a reference to the email virus/worm GURONG.A from 2006.
A feature of this worm is that it would send emails to everyone in your address book, often
with the subject or first line "Hello Friend".
The phrase continues to be used in spam, but the first virus to include the phrase made
it "popular" in hacking circles.
The address that Elliot searches on Google - 3027 W. 12th Street Brooklyn - is in fact
the actual address of the building on Coney Island used for external shots of FSociety
headquarters
Throughout the first episode of season 1, Elliot references "IRC."
Standing for Internet Relay Chat, IRC is an application protocol that allows for plaintext
communication via a client/server model.
A server hosts a "channel" where users can join to discuss various topics.
However, "robots" are prevalent on servers.
These allow users to communicate with the server itself, and request file transfers.
There is a major presence of illegal file transfers facilitated by the use of these robots.
The final octet of the IP Address that the protagonist is given for Colby is not a valid
IP address.
373 is outside of the normal IPv4 range of 0-255.
In first episode of season 1, the security company has to prevent a DDoS attack.
"DDoS" stands for "distributed denial of service."
It's a tactic used to prevent a company's servers from functioning by using all their
bandwidth.
Real or virtual computers all send and receive data to all servers on a network, stopping
legitimate users from exercising real transactions.
This effectively stops business from taking place, causing a loss in revenue and consumer trust
Rami Malek was hired because creator Sam Esmail's then-girlfriend Emmy Rossum had seen him in
The Pacific and recommended him for the lead.
If you go to "e-corp-usa.com" it would actually load up the E Corp website along with a server
down message.
But now the website is up again
The "message to Evil Corp" from fsociety includes a background video of the "prisoners of war
parade" that took place in Donetsk on the Independence Day of Ukraine, during the War
in Donbass.
Steel Mountain, the storage facility which contains Evil Corps tape backups, is a reference
to Iron Mountain, a worldwide operating company which works in records management, information
destruction and data backup and recovery services.
Neither the name Tyrell, nor the surname Wellick, are Swedish names.
Indicating that Tyrell's father is from an English speaking country.
The languages Tyrell Wellick and Joanna Wellick speak between them are Swedish and Danish
. The languages are, together with Norwegian, so similar to each other that if you have
a good understanding of one, you automatically have a decent understanding of the other two.
The picture of the dog shown being liked on Instagram is from the page of creator Sam
Esmail's girlfriend, Emmy Rossum.
The dog is called Cinnamon.
Towards the end of the 3rd episode of first season, Gideon uses his smartphone, displayling
the time as 9:40 pm.
This occurs during the 40th minute of air time excluding commercials.
"Mr. Robot" airs at 9pm central time.
The painting in first season's sixth episode's opening scene is made by Dominican painter
Gilberto Hernández Ortega.
Ortega was a surrealist painter, and is considered to be one of the best of his generation.
The song that plays at the beginning of 7th episode of season 1, when Elliot flashbacks
to when he first met Shayla, is "Pictures of You" by The Cure, which is from the album
Disintegration.
Later on in the episode Elliot deletes Shayla's file on his computer and labels the CD it
was burnt Onto with the same album and band - The Cure, Disintegration, the name of the
song also partly reflects what he is deleting.
Sam Esmail had originally intended Mr. Robot to be a feature film, with the end of the
first act being someone finding out that he had a mental disorder while enacting a greater
scheme.
However, midway through writing the first act, he found that script had expanded considerably,
and that became a script more suited for a television show
He removed 20 pages of around 89 pages of the script then written, and used it as the
pilot for the series, and what was to have been the end of the first act became the finale
of the first season.
Elliot uses VMS to view his father's old pictures in Windows 7 based platform.
He also uses the software when he hacks the jail's network in the car in an earlier episode.
VMS is widely used even today by most of software engineers.
In the opening flashback scene of season one's ninth episode, Elliot's father is reading
the newspaper and asks whether or not he can take Elliot to go see Pulp Fiction in theaters.
Later on in the episode while on the train platform when Angela asks Elliot if he is
ok, Elliot responds "I'm pretty f***ing far from ok".
This is the same line spoken by Ving Rhames' character Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction.
Esmail took the script to Anonymous Content to see if it could be developed into a television
series, which was then picked up by USA Network.
USA Network gave a pilot order to Mr. Robot in July 2014, and picked it up to series with
a 10-episode order in December 2014.
In the whole first season, when ever they show us Elliot's phone, the battery is 22%.
Knowing he was going to direct it entirely, Sam Esmail managed to have the full second
season written before shooting it.
That way, scenes from different episodes were shot in a row, based on the location available.
The character of Fernando Vera tells Elliot's character that their names mean the same,
having the same origin.
The actor playing Fernando Vera is named Elliot Villar.
The main cast along with creator Sam Esmail went to hacking seminars in preparation for
their roles.
In addition, Rami Malek had a typing instructor to prepare scenes involving programming.
in episode nine it's revealed that Mr. Robot's real name is Edward Alderson, it is written
on his tombstone.
Elliot watches a Vimeo of his fall at the boardwalk.
That clip can be watched online on the Vimeo website under the same user, sk8r904.
The episode, entitled 'zer0-day' was originally scheduled to air 26 August, 2015, but delayed
by the network concerns about backlash.
Scenes in the finale have similarities to an actual tragic shooting occurring earlier
that same day in Roanoke, VA.
Thus, the delayed airing was itself due to a zer0-day event.
The Harp-player in the first season's last scene is playing "Nearer My God to Thee",
which was also famously played on the sinking Titanic and thereby providing a metaphor for
the falling star of corporate power.
It is also a clear reference to Gideon's earlier statement where he said that working at AllSafe
felt like rearranging chairs on the Titanic.
In the first season, actor Rami Malek used crushed vitamin B pills for scenes where he
sniffs morphine, and used a special device hidden in his sleeve to vacuum the powder.
He also allegedly used it to prank people off-set by lining up extraordinarily long
lines of powder and "sniffing" them.
In the sitcom-like opening credits, Christian Slater received second billing instead of
the usual "and" billing.
The chess game played between Elliot and Ray follows the game between Roesch and Willi
Schlage played in Hamburg in 1910.This is not the first time this particular game was
recreated on screen.
It was previously featured in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey for the game between
Frank Poole and the HAL-9000 Super Computer.
Mr. Sutherland can be seen playing Watch Dogs while Elliot is in the hardware store.
When the gunner is walking towards the diner in the final scene, the timer on the crosswalk
counts down the time until he starts shooting.
While in the room with the fish tank, a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" is shown lying
on the table.
This book is well known for being adapted into the movie directed by Stanley Kubrick,
who is a large influence of Sam Esmail and of the show in general.
The language spoken by the cab driver was Egyptian.
Rami Malek's father is Egyptian and Sam Esmail's parents are Egyptian.
All source music in eleventh episode of season 2, such as from the radios in the van or the
cab, are all from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack of Back to the Future
In True Romance, Christian Slater goes to an amusement park and rides a roller coaster
with a character named Elliot.
In Mr. Robot, Christian Slater goes to an amusement park and rides a ferris wheel with
a character named Elliot.
Despite the tech savvy nature of the show, Rami Malek tends not to engage in social media
such as snapchat, instagram, twitter, etc.
As said in his interview with Colbert, he finds it to be too "polarizing."
Although BD Wong a.k.a Whiterose is of Chinese descent, he does not speak any Mandarin or Cantonese.
Knowing the truth about the character of Mr. Robot, the actors were instructed to never
look or react to Christian Slater in the scenes where Slater and Rami Malek are in the same
room, because everything he says is either Elliot's imaginations or Elliot is the one
saying it.
Although Christian Slater plays Rami Malek's father, in real life Christian Slater is only
11 years older than Rami Malek.
This is appropriate as the Mr. Robot figure is Elliot's memory of his late father's appearance.
The arcade booth named 'Dark Seouls' is a reference to a cyber attack that occured in
South Korea in 2013 caused by a malware named 'Dark Seoul'.
It paralysed banks, ATM's and television stations.
A 50 years old man indentified as Mr.Kim was the principal suspect, and seemingly connected
to North Korea.
When Elliot is talking to Joanna Wellick, she says something to him in Danish with a
sinister smile, to which he replies "Excuse me?
I don't understand what you're saying."
It's the only part through the whole season that isn't subtitled.
The words are
which translates to "If you have done something to him, I will kill you."
Elliot and Darlene use the Python and Ruby programming languages for creating their various
hacks and exploits.
The on-air suicide of the Evil Corp executive was very similar to the real life on-air suicide
by politician R.Budd Dwyer.
There are even similarities between the blood effects used compared to the real suicide.
On 7/10/16 during a live Q&A on Facebook, the screen cut to black and a masked man appeared
to introduce what would be the first half of the season 2 premiere.
The video was only available for a few hours.
The QR code in Elliot's journal leads to an actual website.
It is a seemingly under construction website from the nineties for one Confictura Industries.
When Darlene is siting at the computer typing in source code one of the text brackets reads
"Hack the Gibson".
The Gibson was the name of the super computer in Hackers
FBI agent Dominique DiPierro exchanges IRC messages with HappyHardonHenry806, a likely
reference to Christian Slater alias Happy Harry Hardon in Pump Up the Volume
Darlene tells Elliot "Init 1".
"init 1" is one of the earliest phases of startup of the Unix operating system after
a reset.
So essentially Darlene is saying - let's start over.
When Elliot is in his room thinking about Ray and his website, Mr Robot argues with
him, telling him Ray is not "some coffee shop owner."
This is a reference to the first episode of the show, where Elliot confesses to the coffee
shop owner that he hacked him and found the owner's Adult site, just like Ray's site
In particular, Esmail credited Fight Club as the inspiration for a main character who
suffers from dissociative identity disorder creating a new manifestation of his deceased
father in the form of a hacker, as well as for the anti-consumerist and anti-establishment
spirit of its characters.
In an interview, Esmail explains how playing the song that Fincher used to underscore the
climax of his film when Elliot initiates the hack in episode nine is intended as a message
to the audience that he is aware of the inspiration they took from Fight Club.
As the production crew was unable to shut down Times Square for filming, the scenes
at Times Square in the finale were shot late at night just before the 4th of July holiday
weekend to catch the area at its emptiest.
On July 21, 2016, a virtual reality episode of Mr. Robot was created for fans and was
found in the Within VR app.
The episode is available on YouTube.
E Corp's logo bears striking resemblance to that of Enron, a Houston-based corporation
that famously went bankrupt in 2001 after accounting fraud was uncovered.
There were 164 actors brought in before Sam Esmail and producers decided on Rami Malek.
Creator Sam Esmail made this show after being disappointed with the poor portrayal of computer
hacking
In the first episode, when Elliot encounters Mr. Robot for the first time inside the train,
if you look a little more to the right you can see the show's creator Sam Esmail.
Each episode name in Season 1 ends in a video file name extension like .flv and .mov
Season 2 episodes end in an encrypted file format such as .tc and .aes
Elliot's black hoodie is from Rami Malek's own personal wardrobe.Because Rami Malek brought
his own hoodie, the brand B:SCOTT made twenty identical hoodies for the show.
Malek stated the other hoodies are not as comfortable as his own.
The OS that Elliot uses 99% of the time and the rest of the cast for that matter, is Linux
and Elliot's PC at home is running Kali Linux or some variant, with a Gnome Desktop which
is mentioned by Tyrell when they meet for the first time in the pilot episode.
Rami Malek often pranks on-set with the cast and crew.
He had decorated Carly Chaikin's trailer with gummi bears, which is her character's
For the sitcom sequence in the second season, creator Sam Esmail and his crew researched
and consulted with other crew members who worked on 80's/90's multi-camera sitcoms,
as well as learning how to film an episode in that format.
For authenticity, Beta tapes and cameras were used to film the sequence as well as playing
laugh tracks on-set.
To properly represent Elliot's mental disorders, the production team consulted with a psychiatrist
to read over episode scripts.
Scenes shot outside of Elliot's apartment are filmed on location in Manhattan's Chinatown
and show the facade of a real apartment building at 217 E Broadway, New York, NY 10002, as
well as a real Chinese restaurant named Bo Hai Dumpling Town.
Rami Malek and costar Grace Gummer have worked together before in the movie Larry Crowne.
According to a phone interview with Jeremy Holm on AfterBuzz TV, dummy scripts were used
for preparation and real episode script were used for table read sessions to elicit reactions.
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