‘Zero Day’ Netflix Cast And Creators Discuss Real Cyberattack Dangers

In a world of ever-advancing technologies and a growing divisiveness surrounding political decisions within our modern society, there is one new Netflix series, now streaming, that will make you question – How do we find truth in a world of crisis?

Created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim and Michael S. Schmidt, Zero Day is a gripping, thought-provoking and all-too-timely six-part limited series about how a strategic cyberattack can affect our faith in national security, ignite a wide array of conspiracies and blur the perception of facts.

Starring Robert De Niro, who plays a former U.S. President named George Mullen in his first major television role, and co-starring fellow Hollywood stars Angela Bassett, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Jesse Plemons, Lizzy Caplan and Matthew Modine, Zero Day is full of engaging and full-dimensional characters, embodied by celebrated actors within this impressive ensemble cast.

So, what exactly does “Zero Day” mean? Director and executive producer Lesli Linka Glatter said during our new conversation, “A ’Zero Day’ event is a flaw in software that can be hacked and it can bring down an entire industry. So, let’s say the power grid, the aviation and transportation, banking – they’ve all happened one at a time. Though it’s never happened – let’s hope it doesn’t – this is a cyber weapon and it takes down every industry simultaneously, only for one minute, but it is enough to strike fear into the country.”

As for how this episodic storytelling idea initially came about, co-creator and writer Oppenheim said, “Zero Day was born out of a series of conversations that Eric and I had in late 2021. We’re longtime friends and we were chatting about the issues in the world that we found to be most concerning, most frightening – and top of both of our lists was the fractured relationship that America has – really, the world has – with the truth. This reality that we’re all now living in, where people can choose their own sets of facts and whatever comforts them or whatever serves their purposes.”

Newman added: “Things that are going on in our world right now and any similarities they may have to the things that we’ve posited in a show we wrote three years ago, by the way, are purely coincidental and shocking to us, that it appears that we’re predictive in some way – that we had some crystal ball, and we did not. We would sit on-set and read together – Mike and Noah and myself – we’d read things that were happening in the world and say like – Oh my god, like this is really lining up with the fiction of our show. So, it was a strange kind of experience. We were very surprised by a number of things that when you watch the show, people are going to think that we saw it coming. We did not.”

Speaking with a few of the talented actors leading this Zero Day production on-screen, I wondered whether they believe, with the advancements in technology – including AI – if a “Zero Day” cyberattack could potentially happen within the foreseeable future in our real world.

Allen, who plays Sheila Mullen, former U.S. First Lady and often the sound of reason for De Niro’s conflicted character, said, “I am afraid that it could happen at some point. We are closer and closer to a day when that actually could happen. I think that any guardrail, safeguards – anything that can be instituted to try to mitigate it or keep it away. I’m not saying it will happen, but it’s a possibility, and I think that’s why the series happened, to throw out – What if?”

Modine, who plays the U.S. Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer on Zero Day, said of his beliefs surrounding a real cyberattack, similar to what occurs on the Netflix series, “I think it’s an inevitability, only because artificial intelligence is so powerful and accelerating at a pace that is inhuman, that we’re not able to keep up with it. So, we’re not able to understand it. If I said I was going to go over to your house and spend the day looking through all your things, you wouldn’t let me, but yet we invite artificial intelligence through our devices and through the apps and through our banking – all of the things that we’ve surrendered to artificial intelligence. We’ve invited them into our home, into our lives, and to the point where, in many ways, we can’t function without it.”

Caplan plays Alexandra Mullen, a U.S. Congresswoman and the grown daughter of George & Sheila Mullen, who is unafraid to challenge the political moves of her prolific parents, said of the chances of a real-life cyberattack, “Absolutely, it’s possible. I think it’s not even a question how possible it is. I hope it’s not a question of if it’s going to happen, but when. I really, really hope that this never happens, obviously, but it’s so plausible and I guess that was sort of the point to make [Zero Day] as believable as possible – like this is how it would look, if it happened.”

As for the show’s underlying theme about the dangerous misuse of clear facts in our society, that can spark conspiracies and widespread public doubt, Allen said of the all-too-relatable issue within our real world, “I think we’re facing that more and more these days, unfortunately, and I find it a very scary prospect. Certainly at my age, I haven’t felt this way in my country until recent years. It adds a whole level of concern to me, actually. And so, I hope that the show kind of illuminates that and it gets people thinking about if it goes so far about what’s true and what’s not true, the potential consequences could be very dangerous.”

Modine said, “It’s terrifying. What George Orwell envisioned in 1984 has become fact and it’s, in many ways, much worse than he could have ever imagined because he never imagined artificial intelligence. There is fact and then there is opinion. Even the news today gives us so much opinion and not so much fact. I think that we can’t live in a world where the institution becomes unstable. If I’m walking across the street and it’s a red light, I know that I can safely walk across the street because I know that we’ve all agreed that when the red light is there, the traffic will stop and allow me to cross the street. What happens when we start living in a world where people don’t respect the red light anymore?”

Caplan concluded about facts now being somehow disputable on this Zero Day series and within our real world, “I think it’s horrible. I feel like we all must think it’s horrible. It’s led us down a not fantastic path. There are some things that should be hard and fast truths. I don’t believe that everything is up for debate. I don’t believe that people’s opinions matter more than the truth. I think we should all be playing from the same playbook, at least. We can disagree from there, but let’s not disagree on the most basic of things.”