Zero Day: Joan Allen and Lizzy Caplan on the parallels between Netflix thriller and real-life politics

Stop me if this sounds too familiar. A roiling America struggles under the weight of division, disinformation, billionaire interests and self-serving politicians.

That’s Zero Day, a Netflix thriller series that is releasing into today’s febrile political environment, but was conceived some years back. It had scant idea it would meet the eerily similar circumstances of this particular moment.

“It really predated these crazy days that we’re living in now, so it’s kind of remarkable, isn’t it?” actor Joan Allen told The Nightly.

Allen is part of Zero Day’s large, impressive ensemble cast which also included Robert De Niro, Connie Britton, Jesse Plemons, Lizzy Caplan, Angela Bassett and Dan Stevens.

Her character is the former first lady to De Niro’s former president George Mullen, who is recruited to lead a commission investigating a country-wide cyber attack that killed thousands and spread intense fear with the promise it will happen again.

Allen, the esteemed star of the likes of The Ice Storm, Pleasantville and The Crucible, is selective about what she’ll take on in recent years, but the Zero Day scripts were more than enough to convince her, that and the chance to work with De Niro.

“They were very well written, and it was touching on issues that are of concern in real life these days.”

There’s no shortage of “issues of concern” raised in Zero Day but there’s one pernicious element that rattles her the most.

“Disinformation is maybe the biggest scare that I carry in my own life,” she said. “If we can’t discern what’s true and what’s not, that’s a very dangerous place to be. The series delves into that reality that we’re currently slipping into.”

Political thrillers, even playing a first lady, is not new territory for Allen, who portrayed Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic of the former president. She was also a VP candidate in The Contender and played the formidable CIA deputy director in two Bourne movies.

Those projects reflected their times in the same way that Zero Day reflects ours where shock jock TV presenters on seemingly fringe platforms and tech moguls can shape and twist what’s “true”.

“You can see how the world has changed, if you think of (the films) as barometers of different eras in which we’ve lived. Because when I think about them now, wow, that was a very different time.

“Nixon was a very different time than The Contender. It gives you this sense of history and how the world changes when you don’t even realise it because you’re living it every day. Your awareness isn’t always picking it up.”

Zero Day has one element which can seem either totally disconnected or entirely connected to the politics of 2025 — it has an optimism and hope that there are still good people in high places who will follow the rule of law and do the right thing. That seems both frighteningly unrealistic and the assurance people desperately crave.

Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan over the weekend won a Writer’s Guild Award and he used his platform on stage to say he would rather have been honoured for dreaming up something more inspiring than bad guy Walter White.

“I have a proposal,” he said. “It won’t fix everything but I think it’s a start. I say write more good guys. For decades we made the villains too sexy and viewers everywhere, all around the world, pay attention. They say, ‘Here’s this bad guy, I want to be that cool’.

“When that happens, fictional bad guys stop being the precautionary tales they were intended to be. God help us, they’ve become aspirational.”

De Niro and Allen’s former first couple, George and Sheila Mullen, are earnest and well-intentioned. “I believe that’s where they come from,” Allen said. “I really do believe they are genuinely, from their hearts, thinking about the wellbeing of the American people and democracy. They lead from that place.”

In Zero Day, Caplan plays the Mullen’s daughter, Alex, who is an elected politician who often clashes with her dad.

Caplan described her as a “traumatised kid who thinks she knows better than everybody else around her. She’s very smart and actually a good person with good intentions, but her arrogance gets in her way.

“Thinking you know better than everybody else around you is not a great way to be, especially when the people around you have so much more experience.”

That person with the more experience? Her father, who Caplan said represented a politician who is respected on both sides of the aisle, even if they don’t always agree with him. She struggled to name a real-life counterpart right now.

“People were saying maybe Jimmy Carter but he’s no longer around. I think Obama, but that’s probably not true because a lot of people have very strong feelings about Obama. Maybe John McCain, but he’s no longer around. I don’t think we do have an example of this and that’s very sad.”

Despite all the political themes, there are two words you won’t hear in Zero Day: Democrat and Republican.

“This is more a comment on how divided the country is and the consequences of having this much aggressive division within one country. Because Robert De Niro is so vocally liberal, maybe people will assume that it’s only telling one side of the story, and it’s really not.

“I really hope people can receive the message, which is a message for everybody.”

Last year, Alex Garland’s film, Civil War, had a similar approach in that it never aligned any political party to the different sides of the conflict, only to be accused of being cowardly apolitical.

Caplan thought Civil War was “so effective and very real”.

“God, that movie was chilling, but yes, that caused a whole stink. You kind of can’t win right now.”

In the time between when Caplan first read the scripts for Zero Day and its release now, the series became less prescience and more a mirror to reality.

“Unfortunately, it becomes more so every day. I don’t want as many things to be as accurate as they’ve been for this show. Pick any other show that I’ve been in, I prefer that to this.

“It’s not supposed to be fantasy, it’s supposed to be as rooted in reality as possible. Our showrunner, Eric Newman is so dialled in and politically savvy, then our two other main writers, Noah Oppenheim is from NBC News and Michael Schmidt is a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist.

“They’re not just screenwriters, these are people with first-hand knowledge about how all of this works, how all of this would go down.

“That’s what makes it scary, how realistic it is.”

Zero Day is on Netflix