Characters / Black Mirror: Shut Up and Dance

Kenny

Kenny

Portrayed By: Alex Lawther

• All for Nothing: After robbing a bank and even killing a man to protect his secret, the blackmailers send the footage to his contacts anyway and the story ends with Kenny being arrested for bank robbery, manslaughter, and possession of child pornography.
• Asshole Victim: Deconstructed. Kenny is actually a pedophile and he did everything he was told to because the blackmailers hacked his webcam and recorded him masturbating to footage of children. The main question of the story is whether or not the blackmailers are in the right in how they punish Kenny for his pedophilia. No matter what Kenny did, he had the right to anonymity and a right to a fair trial, which was denied to him when the blackmailers uploaded the footage anyway and sent it to Kenny's friends and family. Effectively ruining his life and ensuring he lives miserably, even after serving his punishment.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: At first, Kenny is seen as just the average, socially awkward teen who was forced to rob a bank to avoid being humiliated and sexually exploited. However, the ending reveals that Kenny was masturbating to child pornography and everything he did was to avoid being outed as a pedophile to his family.
• Blackmail: At first it appeared that Kenny was being blackmailed with footage of him masturbating and the blackmailers forced him to commit crimes for them. In actuality, the Blackmailers were threatening to expose him as a pedophile because he was masturbating to images of children. The video was more of a bonus for added humiliation.
• Bring My Brown Pants: When he's forced to rob a bank, the sheer panic and fear results in him wetting himself.
• Bungled Suicide: He tries to kill himself, only to find the gun is empty.
• Color Motif: Yellow frequently appears in the episode in association with Kenny; he has a yellow phone screen, his home has a yellow interior decoration, the hotel has a yellow interior decoration, and he wears yellow-tinted sunglasses while robbing a bank. The color actually references Kenny's cowardice, as he did everything in the episode to save himself from being exposed as a pedophile.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Probably unintentional but everything about Kenny is a striking contrast to the previous episode's lead Cooper. Cooper was an adult while Kenny is a teenager. Cooper was tall and had an athletic build while Kenny is slight and frail. Cooper was laid-back and gregarious while Kenny is nervous and uptight. Cooper had long blonde hair while Kenny has short black hair. Cooper was an American tourist while Kenny is a native Brit. Perhaps the biggest difference is that Cooper was a genuinely good person who didn't deserve the bad things that happened to him while Kenny is revealed to be a paedophile willing to kill to make sure his secret doesn't get out.
• Cowardly Yellow: Kenny is associated with the color yellow; he has a yellow phone screen, his home has a yellow interior decoration, the hotel has a yellow interior decoration, and he wears yellow-tinted sunglasses. The color is actually foreshadowing the fact that Kenny is actually a pedophile who was trying to save himself from being exposed to his friends and family.
• Driven to Suicide: He attempts suicide, it's just that the gun isn't loaded.
• Duel to the Death: His final task is to fight a fellow blackmail victim to the death... which he does.
• Dirty Coward: The ending reveals that the Blackmailers had actually recorded Kenny masturbating to child porn and he was doing everything to protect himself from being exposed as a pedophile, including robbing a bank, nearly shooting the bank teller, and even killing the other pedophile to save himself.
• Fate Worse than Death: Whatever happens to him after the end, he's still been outed as a paedophile to his family and everyone he knows so his life is ruined.
• Forced into Evil: At first, the audience was led to believe that Kenny was just the average, socially awkward teen who had the sheer bad luck to get hacked and forced to rob a bank. However, the stranger in the woods reveals that he and Kenny are actually pedophiles and were recorded masturbating to child pornography. While it doesn't diminish the fact that the blackmailers had still sexually exploited a teenage boy, forced him to rob a bank, and would later force him to kill a man, it makes the blackmailers appear as the lesser of two evils in comparison to Kenny and the stranger.
• Foreshadowing: There are a few hints that Kenny isn't as innocent as he says he is.
  • His scene with the child in the diner becomes much more ominous when it's revealed he's sexually attracted to children that age. Also noteworthy is that the normally socially awkward teen becomes much more friendly and socially adept when interacting with some random little girl.
  • Most people wouldn't rob a bank and kill somebody just to stop videos of them masturbating from being leaked unless what they were masturbating to was something illegal, such as child porn.
  • Kenny's paranoia becomes much more justified when you consider why he needed to make sure nobody accessed his computer. His shocked reaction when his sister mentioned she'd been watching videos on it could also be Kenny worrying that she'd come across his storage of child pornography.
  • Kenny seems nervous when condoms drop from Hector's wallet, revealing a picture of his daughter. This reaction isn't embarrassment that condoms have dropped from what seems like his wallet, but rather what the condoms were on top of.
  • Kenny tries to justify his actions before the reveal by stating he was just looking at pictures. This wouldn't be a necessary justification if he was watching normal porn.
• Friend to All Children: His first scene shows that he loves children and gets along very well with them. Horribly subverted when we later find out that he enjoys looking at child pornography, which makes his seemingly cute interaction with a little girl at the beginning very creepy in hindsight.
• Heroic BSoD: "Heroic" is entirely the wrong word. But after being forced to kill a man, Kenny walks out if the woods in complete shock while the police arrest him.
• It's All About Me: It's subtler and arguably more sympathetic than most examples, but it's there. Kenny is so desperate to prevent the fact that he's a pedophile from getting out that he resorts to doing other horrible things like robbing a bank and even murdering another person (who is also a pedophile).
• Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: During the phone call scene at the end of the episode Kenny’s distraught mum tells him that, "there’s a video of you, of you doing..." Even putting aside the fact that Kenny was looking at CP for a moment, having a video like that leaked out onto the open internet would probably be enough for most teenagers to kill themselves over. It doesn't matter what you were masturbating to, it is still an incredibly traumatic and humiliating experience for anyone to go through, to have something so personal and private out there for potentially millions of people to see and ridicule. Hector probably put it best during his pre-robbery speech where he mentions that literally everyone, including "the cunts at work" will mock Kenny endlessly over the wanking video.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Kenny is exploited and manipulated for the enjoyment of others while Kenny is unable to do anything about it, just as how Kenny was watching child pornography that exploited innocent children for his own enjoyment.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: Despite his skinny frame, he was able to fight and kill a much older and stronger man with nothing but his bare hands.
• Nervous Wreck: He spends much of the episode on the verge of a panic attack.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Despite being scared enough to attempt to kill himself rather than fight a Duel to the Death against a much bigger man, the slightly-built Kenny somehow manages to win that fight offscreen.
• Pædo Hunt: As the ending reveals, Kenny was masturbating to pictures of underage children.
• The Reveal: Kenny was masturbating to child pornography, which was why he was willing to go to such extreme lengths to keep it a secret.
• Sexual Extortion: The blackmailers hacked his computer, recorded him masturbating and they used the footage to make him rob a bank. However, they weren't just blackmailing him with sexual extortion; they actually recorded him masturbating to child pornography. The blackmailers were ensuring that he gets a longer sentence for bank robbery, manslaughter, and possession of child pornography.
• Single Tear: For a brief moment, Kenny is just shocked to learn that he's been exposed for "looking at kids." But it's only when his mother tells him that a certain video of him has also been uploaded and seen by literally everyone he knows that a single tear slides down his left cheek from the sheer humiliation of knowing that the footage of him masturbating is going to be up there on the open internet forever and there is nothing he can do about it.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Most people wouldn't suspect a timid nineteen-year-old to be a pedophile.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: His face is locked into an epic one at the end of the episode.
• Tragic Villain: In the messiest possible sense there are implications that he hates himself for what he's done, most notably his attempt to kill himself with the gun he used in the robbery.
• Trauma Conga Line: By the end, he's been forced to rob a bank and kill another person, leaving him traumatized, and will likely be sent to jail for a very long time for both. Worst of all, the trolls reveal his secret anyway so now everyone, including his mother and sister, knows he's a pedophile, meaning his life is destroyed.
• Unwitting Pawn: Played with. Kenny obviously doesn’t want to play the hackers’ game from the start, but quickly finds himself drawn into a vast criminal conspiracy involving a bank robbery and eventual murder. Bullied into submission by Hector and knowing full well what is at stake for him if he doesn’t comply, he is at least partially willing to rob the bank, but when the time comes to fight the other pedophile to the death, he only kills him in self-defense and is visibly traumatized by what he has done.
• Villain Protagonist: In the beginning, he was portrayed as just the average teenage boy who had the misfortune of being hacked and forced to commit crimes under the threat of revealing a video of him masturbating to his contact list. However, the ending reveals that Kenny was masturbating to child pornography and he kills a man to protect himself from being exposed (as well as being tempted to shoot the bank teller while robbing a bank).
• Walking Spoiler: A hugely important aspect of his character is part of the reveal, hence a large number of spoiler tags.
• Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: He seems extremely harmless and innocent. But he's still a paedophile who had willingly bought child pornography to masturbate to and, if his conversation with the girl was any indication, he poses a very direct risk to children.

Hector

Hector

Portrayed By: Jerome Flynn

• All for Nothing: His secret is revealed at the end.
• Asshole Victim: Like with Kenny, it's deconstructed. Hector may not be the most pleasant guy around given that he cheats on his wife with prostitutes and the way he bullies and shouts at the much younger Kenny―who, as far as Hector is aware, was only caught masturbating by the hackers―into committing a bank robbery just to save his own ass from having the aforementioned infidelity exposed to his wife. But what the blackmailers do to him is so humiliating that it makes you question if he really deserves it, and they themselves comes off as no better people in comparison.
• Blackmail: Like Kenny, he's a victim of it.
• Break the Haughty: He's honestly kind of a dick, and he did try to cheat on his wife with a prostitute. But he also goes through the horrific experiences of being blackmailed, robbing a bank (as a getaway driver anyway), and then has his misdeeds exposed anyway.
• Disproportionate Retribution: While what Hector did was unquestionably wrong, he wasn't breaking the law and did seem genuinely ashamed at what he had done. Ruining his marriage and possibly getting him arrested was overkill.
• The Driver: Acts as one unwillingly for Kenny at the behest of the blackmailers.
• Drives Like Crazy: Forced on him, when he has to get to a designated location in a short span of time.
• Driven to Suicide: He tells Kenny that he'd kill himself if he lost his children. Seeing how his big secret is revealed to his wife, there's little room for doubt their marriage is over and his wife will inevitably leave with their children.
• Everyone Has Standards: Hector is shocked that watching pornography was all they had on Kenny. He, a family man, thankfully never finds out what kind of pornography Kenny was watching.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: He was trying to commit infidelity, which is definitely bad, but he's overall a good person and a loving father and husband who claims his actions were just a one-time thing and his actions definitely didn't merit what he went through.
• Nice Guy: Claims to be one when he's not under pressure. For the most part, he does seem like one, except for the fact that he tried to cheat on his wife. He even tries to reassure Kenny that masturbating is perfectly normal and everyone does it.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: When he asks what Kenny was caught for, he's shocked when Kenny tells him he was filmed masturbating; justifying that everyone does that, in fact even the pope probably does that. Hector doesn't notice how he hit a nerve with that latter statement, considering what Kenny was actually guilty of.
• Papa Wolf: He absolutely loves his kids and his main reason for keeping his infidelity a secret is because he knows his wife will take them with her when she leaves.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: He has quite a foul mouth. Understandable given the shit storm he's found himself in. And consistent with Jerome Flynn's Game of Thrones character Bronn, who's quite the potty-mouth himself.

The other blackmail victims

• Ambiguously Gay: It has been speculated that the man tasked with bringing Kenny the cake was secretly in a relationship with the other man who is seen being yelled at during the sequence where the blackmailers leak his transgressions to his family. Especially going off the running theme that the worse the person's "crime," the harsher the punishment (with Kenny and the man he's forced to fight having been caught watching child porn), the fact that he appears to not have been given any additional tasks beyond delivering the cake and photographing Kenny lends this idea some credence.
• Asshole Victim: Much like Kenny and Hector the other victims aren't very good people, but the way the hackers treat them is so cruel and inhumane it truly makes you question if they’re any better than them by comparison. Never mind the fact that out of the five people involved, only Kenny and the man in the woods had actually committed a crime before being contacted by the hackers; neither the CEO nor the moped rider as far as we know had done anything illegal, despite their actions being immoral and wrong.
• Noodle Incident: While the employer was outed for racist remarks against an interviewee, the biker is left unrevealed, but his family begins attacking him and another man for being "perverts" (so it could have something to do with homosexuality or perhaps incest); but other than that vague clue it's left completely up in the air.
• Pædo Hunt: The man Kenny meets in the woods near the end of the episode is a pedophile also, and is so scared by the prospect of his crimes being revealed to the world that he is willing to murder a teenage boy just to prevent that information from being leaked.
• Pet the Dog: The blackmailers don't ask the biker or employer to do anything too crazy (hiding keys in a car and delivering a cake) and they even gave False Reassurance that they will let them go when they're done, which is something not done with Kenny and Hector who merely got threatened into going along with the blackmailers plans.
• Unwitting Pawn: The day's events are left unknown to the other victims, but their actions lead to the most vital parts of the operation (the biker delivers a cake that has the gun inside it and the employer gives the getaway car).

The Blackmailers

The Blackmailers

Portrayed By: N/A

• Blackmail: The hackers blackmail their victims by threatening to release evidence of their indiscretions to the people they know and love, continuously upping the stakes for them and forcing them to commit criminal acts to see how far they’ll go to keep their shame hidden.
• The Chess Master: Their day's entertainment consists of pulling off a bank heist with no less than five unwilling participants operating semi-independently; if they actually were interested in gaining the robbery money they would have no problem doing so.
• The Cracker: It's in fact what kicks off the plot.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of the Vigilante Man, if the story was written from the perspective of the hackers, they would be portrayed as antiheroes for exposing a pedophile but the story shows the perspective of the victim of a vigilante. Regardless of their intentions, Kenny was still a scared kid who was being sexually exploited and forced to commit crimes, which could have resulted in the death of an innocent bank teller and it did result in the death of the stranger in the woods. While Kenny did get what he deserved for acting on his pedophilia, the hackers still did more harm than good, regardless of how deserving the victims of the hackers were. There's also the fact that they upload footage of Kenny masturbating to child porn to the open internet, making them guilty of distributing child porn as well.
• Didn't Think This Through: Considering they upload footage of Kenny masturbating to child porn, if Kenny's lawyer takes advantage of that during the case and they get the hackers' identities, they are screwed 9 ways from sunday!
• Everyone Has Standards: They make sure that the gun they give Kenny isn't loaded. Whether this was to keep him from hurting anyone during the robbery or to make sure he couldn't escape his final fight by pulling a gun or escaping his ultimate fate by killing himself. Given the series, it's safe to assume the latter.
  • They also don't force the other two unknown victims into doing anything too drastic; so its safe to assume the victims didn't do anything too horrible to warrant their treatment.
• For the Evulz: In the end, this is their only real motivation, to put their victims through sadistic emotional torment for their own entertainment.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: Their identities are never revealed to the audience, though some people have assumed that a sketchy-looking teenager Kenny and Hector come across at the Wayhaven Hotel could have been in on it somehow.
• Karma Houdini: The hackers evade consequence for their own illegal actions while their victims are left to have their lives and reputations utterly destroyed by the end of the episode.
• Karmic Trickster: Implied by the fact that all of the people they go after are guilty of things such as pedophilia, adultery, racism, etc.
• Kick the Dog: Deconstructed. Their victims are far from innocent, with at least two being outright paedophiles, but the hackers are unquestionably cruel in their treatment of them and seem motivated more by that cruelty than any sense of justice. They also reveal all their secrets at the end anyway for no reason other than sadism.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: As deplorable as their methods were, Kenny and the bloke in the woods were both still pedophiles who chose to act on their urges and even tried to kill each other to prevent their secrets from being revealed to the public. The Blackmailers, at least, made sure the guns were fake and they only targeted people who did something to deserve their attention (ranging from possession of child pornography to basic adultery). If the messages were anything to go by, there was actually nothing stopping Kenny from turning himself in and reporting the blackmailers for what they were doing since they were forcing him to rob a bank and even kill a man under the threat of blackmail.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: It's made pretty clear that their actions are motivated far more by petty cruelty towards what they see as acceptable targets than any sense of justice.
  • It should also be noted that they uploaded footage of Kenny masturbating and the porn he was masturbating to, which would make them guilty of distributing child pornography. This effectively makes them no better than Kenny himself.
• Sadist: Although their victims are far from innocent the blackmailers aren’t portrayed sympathetically either, as they visibly enjoy tormenting and torturing them throughout the episode.
• Troll: What they are revealed to be. They even send a picture of a trollface to their victims when they reveal their secrets.