Paradise episode seven: Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden on that intense apocalyptic scenario

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR PARADISE EPISODE 7, “THE DAY”

In the TV series Paradise, the world ends with a bang and not a whimper.

Not just any bang but a supervolcanic eruption beneath the ice in Antarctica, which sets off a tsunami 30 storeys high moving at a rate of 1000km an hour.

Australians, we’re sorry to tell you, we’re among the first to go, along with New Zealand, Argentina and South Africa. Onscreen, the characters bemoan that Melbourne and Sydney are completely underwater.

By lunchtime in Washington D.C., the whole southern hemisphere is submerged, and the full-scale of destruction of the American capital is only five hours away.

With the imminent demise of Earth, every nuclear power sets off their arsenal of missiles, aimed at each other’s most populous cities, in case there’s a scramble for resources in whatever is left of the world.

This is how the world ends on Paradise, the post-apocalyptic political thriller that debuted on January 26 with the twist that everything that’s taking place is in an underground bunker built for 30,000 handpicked survivors. Handpicked by a cabal of billionaires, head by the villainous tech mogul Samantha Strauss who’s really calling the shots.

All season, Paradise has been parsing the trauma of what it’s like to survive the unsurviveable and all the trauma, guilt and, in some characters’ cases, scheming that goes along with this new world.

The seventh episode, which premiered this week on Disney+, flashes back to the day the world ended, and it is the most intense hour of television to drop so far this year. The series itself has been inconsistent, but this episode is an absolute banger.

Your jaw is hanging open, your heart is beating fast and a whole new slate of nightmares can be added to your already teeming collection of paranoid apocalyptic scenarios. What fun!

Amid the chaos on screen, two characters are being propelled forward by the crazy momentum of the story – US President Cal Bradford, played by charisma bomb James Marsden, and his secret service protection officer Xavier Collins, portrayed by the inimitable Sterling K Brown.

“It feels like a film, a really big budget action film,” Marsden told The Nightly of his experiencing making episode seven. “But also with crazy amounts of emotion and drama, and that was intense.

“I know we’re actors presenting a fake world to everybody, but there something on set, an eerie feeling. It wasn’t like everyone knew they were just doing some goofy science fiction thing. It was scary.

“It just provides a scenario that is provocative, and hopefully starts a conversation. On set, there was this weird quiet, and I could sense that everyone was thinking, ‘How close are we to this? Jesus, what would this be like for me if I were in this situation?’.”

Paradise premiered in the week after the 2025 Presidential Inauguration and the timing of a series that sketches out an end-of-the-world plot in which billionaires and politicians warned about climate disaster chose to build an escape hatch for themselves, was not lost on anyone.

“It was such an interesting experience for us in and around the inauguration because obviously there are parallels that people are drawing, quite readily, even though it wasn’t anybody’s intention for the show to be as reflective of a possible present or near future,” Brown recalled.

“That said, we draw inspiration from what’s around us, and it does make you ask sincere questions about the nature of capitalism and politics and the kind of bedfellows they are, and the real power, especially as you see a strange thing being played out in the States right now with regards to the richest man in the world.”

Paradise was not meant to coincide with the upheaval unleashed in the first few weeks of the current administration. Marsden said series creator Dan Fogelman started writing the show a decade ago while Brown added that the production had been delayed by the actors and writers strike of 2023.

If it had stuck to schedule, it wouldn’t be coming out now, and sparking the same tenor of conversations.

“It was meant to be thought provoking because I think any good storytelling makes you question the world in which you live,” Brown added. “But I don’t think it was ever intended to be quite as close as it ended up being.

“It probably helps the show, but I won’t say it was done purposefully. That would make me feel like a gross person. I don’t like that it’s as close to reality as it is.”

Such a vivid depiction of the day of the apocalypse inevitably triggers conversations – what do you think it’ll look like, would you be a survivor, what is your contribution in a dystopian world?

Paradise has brought up these conversation with Marsden and his friends. “I thought about this stuff a lot. It’s really the lesser of two evils. You could argue that being one of the lucky ones to be surviving would be almost more torturous on your soul, and its own version of a prison, more so than staying behind and not surviving.

“Am I with my family, with my friends? The insurmountable guilt I would be feeling as well. But also, it’s necessary to have somebody to survive and carry on humanity. It’s a fun little existential conversation to have, for sure.”

Brown, who went to Stanford University in the cradle of Silicon Valley, said he knows people – “this is not even a joke” – who have bought plots of land in undeveloped parts of the US for the worst case scenario.

“I went (to college) with some people who think outside of the box a little bit, you know what I’m saying? Because times are unpredictable,” he said.

“The way the first days of (this) president have gone have a lot of people wondering, ‘Oh snap, this is not a game being played right now’.”

Paradise is streaming on Disney+