Robert De Niro has officially made his first big foray into television in the Netflix political thriller “Zero Day,” which premiered on Thursday. The Oscar-winning actor known for films like “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas” and “The Godfather Part II” said that the opportunity to jump into the TV space and meet showrunner Eric Newman came through a conversation with his agent.
“I was talking with my agent about doing something in New York, where I could be there for five or six months and the limited series was the way to go and he introduced me to Eric. And as I was reading the material and so on, I committed to it,” De Niro told TheWrap. “He had good people with him, Noah Oppenheim, Michael Schmidt, and the three of these guys put this really good script together. So I was lucky that it was a project that I didn’t have to think too much about having to do. It was good material, intelligently written and a world that they knew and understand.”
De Niro compared working on “Zero Day” to doing “three feature films back to back.” He added that there was more exposition dumping that was “a little more confining in a certain way” and a “very strict” production schedule compared to some of the other projects he’s worked on.
“It was different than a feature, especially than with certain directors that I’ve worked with, but it was good. It’s just another structure, if you will,” he added.
De Niro portrays former U.S. president George Mullen, who comes out of retirement from politics to lead the Zero Day Commission, a task force tracking down the perpetrators of a devastating cyberattack responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans, only to discover a vast web of lies and conspiracies.
Oppenheim noted there was a concerted effort to make the show as authentic and real as possible, with both he and EP Mike Schmidt leveraging their government agency and White House contacts from working in journalism.
“We called upon our network of relationships to ask people, ‘Hey, if this actually happened in the real world, how would the government respond? What would the conversations look like?,” he told TheWrap. “So that was really important to us, to render a world that felt familiar in terms of how it parallels our current world.”
Mullen is inspired by former real-life presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, as well as some congressmen and senators who De Niro says he would regularly watch in television interviews.
“I get a lot of information from that,” he noted. “That’s the thrust of who we were thinking of, but not anyone specifically.”
Left out of that list is Donald Trump, who’s returned for a second term in the White House. When asked if the outcome of the 2024 election had any impact on the final product of the show, Oppenheim insisted that wasn’t the case, telling TheWrap nothing about the story, themes or characters really changed since development began back in late 2021.
“We were really interested in exploring the fact that we now live in a world in which people can retreat into their own realities, that we have a fractured relationship with the truth. We don’t agree on what it is anymore, which makes it hard, very hard, to confront any other dangers that we’re all facing,” Oppenheim said. “We wanted to tackle what I think are pretty timeless themes: How far are people in power willing to go if they think they’re acting on behalf of a righteous cause? What rights and and freedoms are people willing to give up to those in power if they’re scared and afraid? We wanted to look at the role that technology now plays in our life, and the relationship between wealth and and democracy.”
“The resonance of them all have obviously changed and evolved over time. I think it’s only gotten heightened and it’ll just be really interesting to see how some of these characters and themes and the story lands in this current moment,” he continued. “It’s not anything we could have anticipated and it’s certainly nothing we adjusted for in the process.”
“Zero Day” notably shies away from explicitly stating the characters’ political parties – a decision Newman says was made “by design,” citing the “confused relationship” both the country and the world at large is having with the concept of truth.
“I don’t think it’s just uniquely American, but is a truly bipartisan problem. Both sides have an inability to see the other truth,” Newman said. “So for us to vilify one group over the other, would have done the larger message a disservice.”
Oppenheim added that the team worked really hard to make sure every character’s point of view in the show was “coherent and, on some level, defensible.”
“Our hope is that you watch the show and when certain characters are speaking and say ‘Oh, that makes sense. I agree with that person.’ And then as soon as their opposing view is presented, you say, ‘Oh, well, okay, now I understand where that person’s coming from as well’,” he continued. “I think if you smack a partisan label on something, it’s not all that helpful really in illuminating things. These labels’ meaning changes over time and I think the audience hears a partisan label and they immediately make presumptions about that character and tune them out to an extent. That takes them really out of the story.”
All episodes of Zero Day are streaming now on Netflix.
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