Dan Stevens, the star of films likeThe Guest,Beauty and the BeastandGodzilla x Kong: The New Empire, recently appeared in the new political thriller series,Zero Day. In the miniseries starring Robert De Niro, Stevens plays Evan Green, an alternative-media personality who capitalizes on a major terrorist attack and speaks out loud against the government on YouTube. Yes, Green is a fictional version of every loudmouth who makes money in today’s digital landscape by criticizing political leaders and creating conspiracy theories out of nothing.
It’s not exactly a secret that the character is inspired by a real cultural phenomenon, and Stevens fully agrees with that.In Netflix’sZero Day, the United States faces an unprecedented cyberattack. There are thousands of casualties, and the government forms a commission that will help in finding some answers to prevent another major attack. As former President George Mullen leads the commission that’s trying to find the culprits, the country seems more divided than ever.
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YouTuber Evan Green is a fine representation of alternative media, and speaking toThe Hollywood Reporter, Stevens revealed that he was inspired by major personalities like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. But they were not the only ones:
“It’s great that you recognize all three [adding Alex Jones] of those because they were definitely in the mix. It wasn’t one specifically. I was just consuming everything voraciously. There were characters on the left as well as the right, like Brian Tyler Cohen or 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.”
The actor went on to add that:
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.
“It’s Shocking to Everybody How Prophetic It Has Become”
Zero Dayis all fiction, of course. Created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, and Michael Schmidt, the show offers a grim look at the scope of a cyberattack that exploits every vulnerability in a modern society that’s so thoroughly interconnected. Narrative (and very creative) liberties apply, and the show focuses more on the reason behind the attack than the effect.
This is whenZero Daybecomes truly eerie, when it sheds some light on the power held by the unstable and real leaders of the digital age.The attack involves a tech mogul, played by Gaby Hoffmann, who shows her true nature when she’s surrounded and has nowhere to go. The conclusion ofZero Dayis a great insight into the times we’re living in today, where technological “geniuses” are rising to power and like the idea of total world domination:
“There are very timeless themes running right 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, Michael and Eric 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.
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.”
