Lizzy Caplan on acting with Robert de Niro in new Netflix thriller Zero Day
Lizzy Caplan, centre, in Zero Day with Matthew Modine. (Pictures courtesy of Netflix)
Netflix’s new series poses the question: how do we find truth in a world of crisis, one seemingly being torn apart by forces outside our control?
The series centres on a former US president tasked with finding the culprits behind a devastating cyber attack that has cost thousands of lives. The nature of truth, misinformation and disinformation are key talking points in the show - and the importance of truth in our lives certainly isn’t lost on its star Lizzy Caplan.
“I definitely think that was the jumping off point for creating this show, and definitely the central question,” says Caplan. “It really continues to boggle my mind that it is a question that we are still asking. The answer becomes more and more convoluted with every year. To me, it's not a conversation, what is true and what is not true. There’s true and there is false, and that's how honestly it should be. If we start weighing people's opinions about what is true and what is fact, then we end up in a very messy situation. And we currently find ourselves in that very messy situation," says the US actress.
stars acting legend Robert De Niro as respected former US President George Mullen, who is charged with finding the cyber attackers as fear of a repeat attack breeds conspiracy theories and disinformation. Caplan plays his fiercely independent and sharp daughter Alexandra Mullen, a Congresswoman who has distanced herself from her father’s political legacy to form her own path.
The series was written by Mike Schmidt and Noah Oppenheim, who both have a background in news journalism. The two met while working on their school newspaper as teenagers. Schmidt went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist for The New York Times, while Oppenheim became president of NBC News.
“You usually just get people popping in and out as consultants, but they were there all the time,” says Caplan. “They were writing the scripts with Eric (Newman). It was incredible, and a big safety net - you didn't have to fear being unbelievable within those government offices, because we had people there to tell us how it would go down.
“It led not only credence to the finished product, but it was really helpful on set,. You could say: ‘What does somebody do in this situation when they're walking up the courthouse steps and there's reporters, do you acknowledge them?’ They knew all of the answers, because they've been in that world for so long.”
The daughter of a political aide mother and a lawyer father, Caplan developed an interest in acting at school, and upon graduating landed supporting roles in shows including Freaks and Geeks and Smallville. Mean Girls, in which she plays Regina George’s ex-best friend Janice, was an international smash and she has remained busy in the two decades since.
She’s recently shown her versatility starring opposite Jesse Eisenberg in the witty and with Joshua Jackson in a new series of .
In , she shares several scenes with the iconic Robert De Niro making his episodic TV debut. “There are plenty of very talented actors, but he's got whatever that thing is that you need to have to be a legend,” she says of working with the actor. “I don't know. I guess you just have to be born with it.”
Caplan’s other co-stars include Jesse Plemons, Joan Allan and Matthew Modine, while the series is directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, a giant of TV storytelling in the US. Best known for her work on Homeland and Mad Men, her other credits include and .
“We were fortunate that we had Lesli Linka Glatter direct all of the episodes,” says Caplan, adding that they were often filming scenes from several different episodes of the dense story on the same day. “Normally in television you have at least two different directors. It's a great luxury to just have one, and even more of a luxury to have her as that person. I had worked with her on one episode of a show I did called 11 years ago. What she did for the entirety of , what I remember her doing on , is she goes up to every actor before every scene and says: ‘This is where you're coming from. This is where you're going next. This is what's already happened. This is what's about to happen. This is the state of mind we're in at this moment.’
“There are a lot of characters in this, and because we had one director, we block shot the entire thing, meaning every day you were shooting scenes from all six episodes. There's a lot of information, and you never, at any point, felt like you didn't know where you were. That's Lesli and our script supervisor just being on top of it. It's like a superpower.”
Caplan has described the circumstances of as a horror story that could happen, and she does hope it gives audiences pause for thought, she says.
“I hope that it makes people question things and not in a do your own research kind of way, but in a more objective fact-finding way. I hope we return back to that unspoken agreement between all human beings about what is truth and what is not.”
The show has echoes of the jittery political thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s that US filmmakers were so good at, such as and . Did Caplan get to revisit any of them?
“Historically it has been something that I like to do, but I have a toddler, I don't get to do any of that anymore. If anything, it just feels like I'm stepping into this long, illustrious line of people who have gotten to make movies in this vein or shows in this vein before, and that feels nice.
“I wouldn't mind getting to luxuriate and revisit many of those classic movies. But honestly, it would probably bum me out, because the rules are so different now. In the past, somebody got busted for doing something wrong. They were punished. There's now like multiple chapters that happen after that chapter, when somebody gets busted, they can deny it or say it didn't happen, or say that you are misinformed thinking that they did that. It would probably make me a little bit blue about the state of the world if I were to go back to watching those movies that took place in times that made more sense to me.”
- is now on Netflix
