When talking about their new Netflix limited series, the creators of Zero Day have been fielding a common question: How did you get Robert De Niro to do TV?
If you ask De Niro, it’s a simple answer.
“I didn’t have any hesitations,” he tells co-creator Eric Newman in a video interview for The Hollywood Reporter about his first small screen role (above). Not only did De Niro sign on for the lead role, he’s also an executive producer. “When we spoke and met first and [Eric Newman] came back with these episodes little by little, they were all good. I said, ‘This is good, smart.’ And the people writing it, [Newman] and everyone else, Mike Schmidt and Noah Oppenheim, you knew what you were writing about and so that was encouraging.”
In the political conspiracy thriller Zero Day, now streaming all six episodes, De Niro plays former President George Mullen, who is described as being the last POTUS who was able to work across the aisle. After a devastating act of cyberterrorism that’s called a zero day event, which refers to a cyber breach that targets unknown vulnerabilities, President Mullen is asked to lead the special investigatory Zero Day Commission to uncover, by any means necessary, how and why this happened, and prevent it from happening again. In this case, the Zero Day attack downed dozens of systems for one whole minute, causing widespread catastrophe and the deaths of more than 3,000 people.
The idea for Zero Day came from creators Eric Newman (Griselda, Narcos, Narcos: Mexico); Noah Oppenheim, former president of NBC News; and Michael S. Schmidt, Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter. The series shot mainly in New York, where De Niro resides, which was also part of the appeal. All six episodes were directed by Leslie Linka Glatter (Homeland, Mad Men).
In a separate interview with THR, Newman and Oppenheim said they needed an actor with the stature of De Niro to play Mullen. “President Mullen is a figure who the country turns to in the aftermath of this catastrophic attack,” Oppenheim explains. “People are terrified, seeking reassurance and comfort. You needed an actor who could immediately embody that dignity, reassurance and confidence.” Newman adds, “Bob got it instantly. He understood completely what we were trying to say and the themes the show presents and posits.”
The co-creators say Mullen, similar to the rest of the ensemble, was not based on any one political figure. De Niro echoes that when talking about his approach. “It’s not that I pulled from anybody in particular, though there could have been of course people,” says De Niro, who has been vocal on his views of Donald Trump in the past but has shied away from mentioning the president when talking Zero Day. “I was just pulling from my own feelings about those things. And what would seem to me would be right on both sides from either character, either side… whether they’re on my side of the aisle or the other side of the aisle. I just felt it had to be more about an honesty between people in order to get anything done. … Doing the right thing.”
As De Niro’s Mullen begins his investigation amid widespread chaos, disinformation and a politically divided country, he eventually learns how deep the conspiracy goes — power brokers in technology, finance and government collide — and, in the end, he is forced to make an impossible choice. Amid all of this, Mullen is accused of not being cognitively fit for the task, as he privately struggles to navigate his new reality. Joan Allen and Lizzy Caplan play his wife and daughter, respectively, while Angela Bassett, Jesse Plemons, Matthew Modine, Connie Britton, Dan Stevens, Bill Camp and Gaby Hoffmann round out the political, media and tech players in his orbit.
The series was conceived in November 2021 and wrapped filming (after a delay from the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes) in June of 2024, before former President Joe Biden, questioned over whether he was fit to run for president, would ultimately step down from reelection to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. The prescient parallel is one of many in the series.
But Zero Day intentionally does not identify Mullen or any of its characters by political party, so as to not distract from the overall takeaways and entertainment value. “We’re not making any partisan statement with the show,” says Oppenheim. “Our hope was to build something that plays as a really compelling whodunnit and that plays as a propulsive thriller that keeps people entertained through six episodes. Trying to put partisan labels on individual characters frankly is a distraction from that. If you put a partisan label on somebody, it’s an obstacle to complexity.”
That message, as De Niro discusses with Newman, tackles accountability and honesty in a post-truth era. As viewers in February 2025 now binge and digest Zero Day, De Niro weighs in on if he has hope for unity amid the real nation’s political divide.
“Of course I have hope. I would like nothing better,” he says. “I think everybody would like that. But some people wouldn’t and that’s to me not understandable. I don’t understand why anybody wouldn’t want that because that’s the only way you can move forward and get things done. And that’s the way it should be. You can have differences, you can be upset with each other but at the end of the day, you wind up working it out, otherwise the country stagnates and the public suffers from it.”
Zero Day is currently streaming all episodes on Netflix.
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