From Homeland to And Just Like That…, modern television has made the loudmouth alternative-media personality such a fixture that by now they’re practically a trope.
But few inhabit the role like Dan Stevens in the Netflix political-thriller series Zero Day, which has become a hit for the streamer and star Robert De Niro since its debut last month. Playing the part of popular YouTuber Evan Green, who gets especially vocal after a major terrorist attack, Stevens, 42, emits conspiracism and sanctimony so deftly, you wonder if he’s planning a side career.
Green occupies a seat that ideally should convey news to a thirsty audience. But in a world where “what should be objective fact becomes subjective,” as co-creator Eric Newman recently told The Hollywood Reporter, the character goes the other way. He sows division and even ends up a suspect himself.
With media becoming more fragmented and distrusted even as (or because) there’s more of it than ever, this felt like a good moment to catch up with Stevens. The theater-trained Cambridge alum and man once known as Downton Abbey‘s Matthew Crawley spent months immersing himself in all manner of troll-y media and podcasts (keep him in your thoughts and prayers) to inform his Zero Day character.
So what conclusions did he come to? THR talked to him by Zoom from his home in Los Angeles to find out.
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Conspiracy theories, a country divided, tech moguls with too much power — I know you finished shooting almost a year ago, but the storylines in Zero Day feel pretty damn timely.
There are very timeless themes running right a’ways through this. Unfortunately, shady government dealings are nothing new; annoying media personalities are nothing new. But there has been a proliferation of these Big Tech moguls, and I think a lot of these themes of the show are born out of our anxiety about them. Noah [Oppenheim] and Michael [Schmidt] and Eric [Newman, the three creators] are very on top of the zeitgeist. It was interesting for them to extract a narrative sufficiently far removed from reality but that definitely still hinted at our reality. We started shooting over a year ago but it’s shocking to everybody how prophetic it has become.
One especially prescient theme is how freedoms can unravel in a time of crisis. Do you think the show has something to say about that part of our moment?
The different ways a revolution might look and the speed at which that might happen, or might need to happen, really struck me. What’s also always fascinating is how much individual personalities affect public policy. Interpersonal relationships have global consequences. That’s terrifying to me.
And then of course there’s what the show has to say about the media moment, which is something you spent a lot of time thinking about when preparing to play this character.
You don’t have to scratch the surface very hard to see that the free press is almost dead, democracy is almost dead. Who writes the teleprompter is a big question for these [media-celebrity] characters. I mean that literally but also figuratively: who is controlling the media output? Each outlet has a responsibility for that. What goes into that output is really worth scrutiny at the moment.
You don’t mean that in a conspiracy-minded way —
No. But what scares me at the moment is the divisiveness — and how much certain parties benefit from the divisions these [media] characters are causing. The loop that one feeds the other is very difficult to break. It’s patently clear that’s what’s happening. It’s going to take serious time and serious effort to unpick that loop.
And it’s not clear we’re even making that effort.
Because it’s profitable not to. As long as we’re operating from a standpoint of profit, from eyeball minutes, as long as that’s what we prize, the loop is never going to be unpicked. Because the division is what’s going to generate the most capital.
Division often based on disinformation, at that.
It’s an undermining of what a fact even is anymore. If you have a certain number of people retweeting something, then that somehow ingrains it into fact. What’s the old phrase: three million Elvis fans cant be wrong? Well actually, they can. Just clicking an outrage button again and again doesn’t make it true. That’s the path we’re going down — whatever has the most eyeballs has the most truth to it. And that’s not how truth works.
How much do entities beyond the personalities deserve blame here. Do tech companies? Politicians? Even us, for gobbling up this stuff?
The system. The system is driving it. Those putting it out, those consuming it, everyone. It’s a triangle. No party is more responsible than the other. In fact they’re feeding each other. The system is the problem. And until we can break out of the system we’re not going to break out of the cycle.
Dan Stevens as Evan Green in Zero Day.
Netflix © 2024
There has been a lot of speculation in media circles over who you had in mind when playing the Evan Green character — Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, even Alex Jones. Can you tell us who you were thinking about?
It’s great that you recognize all three of those because they were definitely in the mix. But it wasn’t any one specifically. I was just consuming everything voraciously. There were characters on the left as well as the right, like [progressive podcaster and YouTuber] Brian Tyler Cohen or [progressive podcast] MeidasTouch or any of those guys who put out sanctimonious criticism of whatever’s going on from their particular perspective. I found all of them deeply unhelpful, not just the ones I didn’t agree with. Even if my politics aligned with one or another, it was the tone; the way of putting stuff out with the headline or thumbnail for the video. It all starts to get incredibly transparently annoying after a while.
You just start to see the game that they’re all trying to play, wherever they’re coming from. It’s funny, some people who have spoke to me about the show have mentioned names I didn’t even watch. But that’s pretty great, too. Somehow I was communicating a generic beacon of an awful media node.
The character is really a critique of a profession, then.
Evan Green is an archetype. He’s a mutant hybrid of all these worst examples of this kind of media personality and I think it’s a blight on our landscape, the cult they engender around themselves. It’s not healthy.
At some point you almost have to wonder if it is so transparently annoying, why are they so appealing!
The vast majority of people are not looking across the board. You’re picking your one guy, whether it’s a late-night host or newscaster or podcaster or whatever, maybe some people have two or three that they go to as some kind of a comfort blanket. I can imagine Alex Jones is a comfort blanket for some. He’s not for me but he must be because he wouldn’t getting the numbers he gets if he wasn’t. Just like Ben Shapiro. Just like Brian Tyler Cohen. It’s like tuning in to the same comforting radio voice back in the day, switch it on and you know what you’re going to get, only now people tune in to be outraged.
And the outrage is seductive. People enjoy being outraged. There are studies that show it actually can become addictive.
There must be a narcotic quality to it. There has to be. Something about raising your blood pressure like that; there’s a dopamine quality to it.
Like sports, which politics has started to really resemble. People love screaming about their team.
If you grew up going to British soccer games you understand the angry outlet, the weekly outlet. But this is daily, sometimes more. I look at Steve Bannon and he’s putting out for or five podcasts a day. It’s like, what are you doing, dude? There’s an erosion of the critical faculty when there’s an overwhelming demand for content. You can’t possibly put out the thought you would put into a weekly op-ed when you have to put something out at 3 p.m. every single day. It takes a lot longer to do good journalism, factual truthful journalism, than to yell some half-baked argument.
And it’s what that argument is meant to do — make you hear more of them.
That’s the thing. It’s not just a lot of content. It’s algorithmic content. It’s stuff that’s steering us away from exciting, inspiring, original creativity into something that is data driven. I think that’s a real curse and dead end for humanity.
Zero Day doesn’t shy away from critiquing tech companies in this regard, how much they’re driving so much of this. Monica Kidder, the tech-mogul character played by Gaby Hoffmann, has a tremendous amount of power and seems to be behind a lot of bad stuff. It’s hard not to compare her to a current tech mogul with a lot of power.
There are a lot of factors that have allowed this to happen, that have allowed Gaby’s character to have that kind of power, that kind of reach within the fabric of government. That wasn’t just one person’s doing. It was a system that allowed someone to be in the chair and have that kind of power. It’s a bigger problem than just one person.
Is there any — dare I use this word — hope?
That really lies within the individual viewer, how much hope you can take away from a story like this at a time like this. Things look pretty hopeless from where Evan Green is sitting. But I hope there is hope out there. Hope needs to find hope. Hope needs to find hope and coagulate into a giant hope.
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Zero Day is now streaming on Netflix.
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