written by David Canfield, Vanity Fair
A few years ago, veteran producer Eric Newman (Narcos, Griselda) took a meeting with Noah Oppenheim, then the president of NBC News. Smack in the middle of Biden’s presidency, Newman asked the news executive to identify “the thing that we’re not talking about that we should be talking about.” Oppenheim replied with a clear answer: “Our relationship as a country with the truth.” He spoke about the cultural silos that create a disorienting sense of competing realities. Facts, Oppenheim had noticed, were being increasingly treated as subjective. While news junkies like Newman had been certainly, casually aware of this development, Oppenheim underlined its significance—and the potential threat it posed. They began talking about how to dramatize this dynamic, to make a statement about where we could be headed.
Enter Zero Day (premiering February 20 on Netflix), a juicy, eerily contemporary political thriller fueled by the sorts of conspiracy theories, cybersecurity risks, and cynical power players that dominate today’s discourse. Newman created the six-episode series (directed by Emmy winner Lesli Linka Glatter) with Oppenheim, who left NBC News last year and signed a production deal with NBCUniversal, then pitched their idea to Robert De Niro over dinner at Shutters in Santa Monica. The premise was tantalizingly simple: a 9/11-style event unfolds in our current fragmented moment, and a well-liked former president steps in to oversee the response amid bitter division.
De Niro signed on swiftly, as both star and an executive producer. “It was important that he stood for honesty and truth—don’t bullshit the public, that’s essential,” he tells me of his character over the phone. “Of course, in this situation, he is questioned—and he is opposed.” In an era where there’s no such thing as a broad cultural consensus, former president George Mullen’s aura of stability pushes his adversaries to promote pure chaos.
Zero Day was conceived, written, and filmed before Donald Trump won reelection as president; he’ll return to the White House for his second term a few weeks before the show’s premiere. In other words, Zero Day will launch in an unnervingly appropriate political context, fresh after an election cycle that highlighted Oppenheim’s notion of competing realities. “I’m obviously disappointed as a Democrat that we didn’t win. But as a filmmaker, and as someone who is considering the best window of release for this show, we definitely wanted to get far enough away from the inauguration so that we didn’t get lost in the jet wash of political reportage that’s going to come out,” Newman says. “There are honest people in government who make hard choices and do the right thing—and my hope is that this will be an aspirational component of our show.”
A vocal (and colorful) Trump critic, De Niro demurs when asked how the show will—or should—be viewed in light of this month’s election. “I’m not sure how it will connect to what’s happening now,” he says. “We’ll see.”
By the time you get to the end of Zero Day’s first episode, you’d be forgiven for assuming the show was written very recently, with a clear intention to model itself on the American political scene’s current main characters. De Niro’s Mullen is tapped to lead a Patriot Act–style commission in response to the terrorist attack, resisting pressure to pin it on Russia given current relations and the nature of the cyberwarfare. His perspective gets muddied as he starts showing signs of cognitive decline, recalling the fierce debate surrounding Joe Biden’s candidacy for reelection before he took himself off the ballot.
From there, more parallels emerge. Mullen’s daughter, Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan), is a relatively progressive member of Congress whose popularity and forthrightness on Instagram signals her as a rising, AOC-esque star. His chief adversary, meanwhile, is Evan Green (Dan Stevens), an inflammatory basement-dwelling commentator clearly inspired by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. The sitting US president Mitchell is portrayed by Angela Bassett, notable in the wake of Americans again rejecting the chance to elect the first female president in Kamala Harris.
“We did not expect Biden’s cognitive issues to become a campaign issue. We did not expect a Black woman to become the candidate,” Newman says. “If anything, in my mind, [President Mitchell] was more based on Michelle Obama or something.”
It’s a credit to the show that the real world echoes so loudly throughout Zero Day. Newman and Oppenheim brought on New York Times investigative reporter Michael S. Schmidt as executive producer, serving the role of what Newman calls their “bullshit detector” from the outset. “No inauthentic ideas took root because they would be immediately dismissed in our brainstorming process,” Newman says. “If it doesn’t feel real, it’s really a wasted exercise.” Several veteran Washington staffers also consulted on the project, while Newman says De Niro brought in Cold War-era CIA sources for his personal preparation.
In his highest-profile TV role to date, the Oscar-winning actor sinks his teeth into a part filled with complexity and mystery. “He is really, really in it—every page of the script, every scene, we would go back and forth on,” Newman says. “He was in almost every scene of the show. It was a really grueling schedule, shot over 100 days. The majority of those days, he was working.” De Niro tells me he helped shape Mullen’s character in one specific direction: “The bottom line is that he’s an honorable person who tries to do the right thing,” he says. “There are ups and downs, personal this and that, his age and whether he’s fit—and that had nothing to do with what happened with Biden.” The actor admits he found the schedule difficult: “It’s a long commitment—like three features at once.”
Both the momentous subject matter and De Niro’s involvement set the stage for a historically impressive cast. In addition to the aforementioned actors, Jesse Plemons shines in a meaty role as Mullen’s deceptive right-hand man, while Connie Britton portrays a savvy strategist who’s got a personal past with Mullen. Character actors like Bill Camp and Clark Gregg get plenty of room to play too. “Every single cast member, we got our first choice,” Newman says. “When you read the script and you realize this is very much about the era in which we live, it’s something you want to be a part of.”
The lineup also includes three-time Oscar nominee Joan Allen, taking on her first role since COVID—and only her second screen project since 2016. She plays the increasingly pivotal character of Sheila Mullen, the former first lady and Mullen’s wife. “The challenge is, if Bob is the former president, who does Bob choose to spend his life with in a way that someone can actually tell him what to do?” Newman says. “You think about the things Joan Allen has been in and the people she’s been opposite and held her own—Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeff Bridges—and she’s always great, always dynamic, and always believable. Given her career, she’s a peer of Bob.”
De Niro adds, simply, “Joan is terrific.”
Played by Stevens with a squirrely verve, Evan Green emerges as similarly central to the plot, stoking the flames of backlash against Mullen—and by extension, the official American response. “Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro—I don’t think that it’s exclusive to the right, but there is a certain type of independent provocateur that they seem to have perfected,” Newman says. “But one of the things that we tried to do was show Green not making things up. There is truth to what he’s saying.” It’s his delivery and packaging that allow him to spread conspiracies, throwing objectivity out the window—a key argument for Zero Day, which takes a familiar political-thriller frame to pose massive questions about the here and now.
“It feels like it could happen. Based on how you feel about the election, this is either going to be an aspirational story about people who can find their way to the truth, even when it’s really hard, or a cautionary tale of the perils of the deep state and absolute power corrupting absolutely,” Newman says. “For me, it’s a little bit of both.”
VFX Supervisor: Douglas Purver
Editor: Hugo Diaz
