Hitflix: Leaving aside yesterday's tragedy, what has the experience been like having real events so quickly parallel stories you told on the show? It got to the point where you had to make a last-minute to the finale scene between Krista and Lenny so he could acknowledge the Ashley Madison hack's effect on his life.
Sam Esmail: It's strange. And just to speak to the specific Ashley Madison line. That was originally in the script. If you remember from the pilot, that's one of the things Elliot hacked about him, and one of the things Elliot used to manipulate him. When I wrote that in the season finale, I went, "Well, I'm kind of overdoing this," referencing Ashley Madison. I wound up cutting it before we were shooting it. And then literally, the news happened again. This is too much. It's almost as if the world wanted me to keep the scene as intended. It was actually purely a plot point. It wasn't that Elliot had released that information, but that these other hackers who hacked Ashley Madison did it, and that's why Lenny was at this desperate point of his life. The whole thing about our show continually having things as a mirror reality, I can only say that it's strange. A lot of people bring it up as some talent I have in being on the zeitgeist of what's going on in the current events. I don't think that's true at all. I just think that hacking is becoming a lot more prominent in the news. Hackers are obviously getting a lot of the spotlight now since the Sony hack. For whatever reason, we've been step in toe with that. We even got picked up on the day the Sony hack happened. That's just stuff I can't predict. In general, the feeling is incredibly surreal.
Sam Esmail, the don
