Don't Expect 'Mr. Robot' Season 3 to Premiere This Summer
Fans will have to wait after the summer to reunite with fsociety.
Hello, friend. Are you panicking over the whereabouts of fsociety and the third season of Mr. Robot? It’s summer. Shouldn’t the new season have arrived by now? Yes, but fret not. The hacker crime thriller will indeed return to the USA Network for a ten-episode season. It’s just airing much later than the usual early summer like the last two seasons.
This year, Mr. Robot will premiere in October. While there are a number of factors that led to this schedule change, one of the most predominant reasons has been Emmy-winning lead actor Rami Malek, whose busy film schedule seems to have kept him from reprising his role as the socially awkward but brilliant Elliot.
Earlier this year saw the release of Buster’s Mal Heart in which Malek played the lead role as Jonah, which The Hollywood Reporter said fans “won’t be disappointed in the least by this vehicle for Emmy-winning series star Rami Malek, which both fits in with Mr. Robot’s delusion-prone paranoia and lets the charismatic actor stretch out in his first feature lead.” After Buster’s Mal Heart, Malek began filming Papillon for director Michael Noer, which is a remake of the 1973 adaptation of the autobiography from a French convict named Henri Charrière. That film is currently in production, with Bohemian Rhapsody to follow for release in 2018. Malek will star as Queen singer Freddy Mercury, which is a challenge for any actor to take up, to say the least. So Malek is busy, but Mr. Robot will be back on TV in just a few months.
And the wait will be worth it because Season 3 of Mr. Robot will have new faces to the cast. Bobby Carnevale, best known for his roles in Will & Grace, Marvel’s Ant-Man, and HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and Vinyl, will join Mr. Robot as a series regular, while BD Wong (Gotham), who plays the recurring character of Whiterose, has been promoted to series regular. And creator Sam Esmail — who recently got married to Emmy Rossum (Shameless), so he’s been busy too — will direct all ten episodes of the new season.
The new season will also have something to say in the wake of the 2016 election. In an interview with Indiewire, Esmail said he was with the writers hashing out Season 3 when Trump was elected. “We were in the writer’s room when the election went down and we saw the tide turning, and then we decided we got too depressed and went home to be with our loved ones,” Esmail said. “We talk about it – the writer’s room is very fluid. Creativity, I think, doesn’t fit work hours sometimes, so we all come in, sometimes just shoot the shit and a lot of that was talking about what had happened.”
While Mr. Robot may or may not reference current events such as Trump, Esmail said the writers won’t ignore “the energy” either. “I’m never going to deny the energy of what’s happened, but it coincided with what we’re doing in the third season,” the creator said. “We kind of went down the road of this sort of dystopic version and here we are present day, so it kind of went hand in hand in a certain extent. But yeah, of course it informed some of our writing.”
It’s a bummer for Mr. Robot fans to have to wait a little later to get a dose of paranoia, corporate hacking, and shocking plot twists they’re used to getting in the warm months of the summer. But come October, the season of Halloween, fans will be prime to get spooked.
Mr. Robot will return in October.
