McKinley Belcher III, Robert De Niro and Connie Britton in ‘Zero Day.’
The new political thriller Zero Day follows the fallout of a catastrophic one-minute cyber attack with the threat of another. More than three thousand Americans die, and countless lives are forever altered.
This gripping thriller comes from Emmy-winning co-creators, executive producers, and writers Eric Newman and Noah Oppenheim alongside award-winning director Lesli Linka Glatter as executive producer and director of all six episodes.
In an interview just before the February 20 premiere, Glatter, who is well-known for the popular political thriller Homeland and the murder mystery Love & Death, described the story behind the limited series as one that challenges the idea of fact versus fiction. “We are telling a paranoid conspiracy thriller.”
Like the characters in Zero Day, Glatter had her world turned upside down when she recently lost her home in the Palisades Fire. She knows what it feels like to have everything change in an instant and how destabilizing that is.
She compared Zero Day to Homeland in that it’s a character-driven thriller that seeks to challenge viewers with conflicting perspectives on various issues. “This is exciting to me. There are certain scenes in which characters argue both sides, and both are right. This is exciting storytelling because each character has their moral compass to contend with.”
Netflix’s ‘Zero Day’ lays out what the future of war could look like and it’s terrifying.
The highly-anticipated limited series details what the future of war could look like. It is a horrifying deep dive into our dependence on the internet and how vulnerable this leaves us. This is war, but it’s not about bombs and guns; it’s about the use of the very technology we rely on used against us.
Robert De Niro stars as former U.S. President George Mullen, who is pulled out of retirement to head the Zero Day Commission, a group of experts tasked with investigating the cyberattack. Mullen’s team must find the perpetrators before they do it again, and they’re working against limited time, disinformation, and the conflicting ambitions of power brokers in technology, Wall Street, and government. This is De Niro’s first time starring in and executive producing a television series.
When Glatter worked on Homeland, she and her team would go to Spy Camp before each season and speak with government officials about what kept them awake at night. Like Homeland, the scenarios played out in Zero Day should keep us awake because they’re plausible.
When asked if she ever worries that viewers with nefarious ideologies could binge-watch the series and get ideas, Glatter says every plot point is heavily researched, and a few have already happened to some degree.
“The first actual Zero Day event happened years ago,” said Glatter. She’s referring to Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm that was first uncovered in 2010. It is believed to have been developed in 2005, and it targets supervisory control and data acquisition systems. Stuxnet is believed to have caused substantial damage to Iran’s nuclear program.
Angela Bassett in Netflix’s ‘Zero Day.’
The cyber attack in Zero Day takes down a multitude of industries simultaneously for one minute, which is followed by a message on everyone’s cell phones warning that it will happen again. This brings out everyone’s worst fears. We want to feel safe, and when that is taken away, it’s a matter of time before people lose all rational thought.
“This scenario gives us a chance to look at how we would behave in that kind of situation as a country and what happens when a government or an individual is given unlimited power,” Glatter explained. “This story deals with the issues of fact versus opinion and what happens when we stop listening to each other, and it’s relevant to our current reality.”
There is also a storyline around another real-life form of attack: brain hacking. There have been several news stories about what has been named Havana Syndrome.
There have been many articles written on the subject dating back to 2016, and CBS’ 60 Minutes had a fascinating episode on this phenomenon wherein high-level American national security officials claimed they were stricken with unexplained brain injuries while on White House grounds and in Washington, as well as overseas in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Several U.S. government officials and their families have reported experiencing sudden symptoms, including vertigo, confusion, and memory loss, and their claims have been taken seriously, with the CIA, FBI, and the State Department investigating the theory that these people may have been injured by an unseen weapon.
Robert De Niro and Connie Britton in ‘Zero Day’ on Netflix.
Could this be the future of war? If so, Zero Day is not only an extremely gripping binge-watch, but it’s also important because knowledge is power, and the reality is that knowledge will always get into the right and the wrong hands.
This potential landscape of war is frightening and also possible, and because of this, Glatter clarified that as entertaining as the series is, it was equally important to remain realistic in their storytelling.
“There’s a level of anxiety everywhere. The world is not on solid ground,” she explained. “I always want to be in the back rooms of power. I want to be in those rooms, hearing the conversations and decision-making on all sides. That’s always very exciting to me, and of course, it makes for great storytelling. It’s a rich world. I always want the juxtaposition between the environment, the world that we all function in, and the human element, too.”
Starring alongside De Niro are Angela Bassett, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Matthew Modine, Dan Stevens, Bill Camp, Gaby Hoffmann, Clark Gregg, and McKinley Belcher III. The thriller also comes from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael S. Schmidt, who serves as writer and executive producer alongside Jonathan Glickman as executive producer.
Up next for Glatter is Apple TV+’s psychological thriller Imperfect Women, based on Araminta Hall’s novel of the same name. Physical creator Annie Weisman adapted Hall’s book for television. Glatter will executive produce and direct the pilot. Elisabeth Moss and Kerry Washington will star and executive produce alongside Kate Mara.
As the President of the Directors Guild of America and one of many Angelenos to have lost their homes, Glatter is excited to confirm that they’ll be filming in Los Angeles. She and her team will begin location scouting and other prep in March.
In a recent speech at the DGA Awards, she urged her colleagues to film in L.A. She reiterated in our interview what she said that night: “We cannot lose Hollywood.”