Even Angela Bassett gets nervous when acting with Robert De Niro. The legendary actors costar as U.S. presidents in Netflix‘s Zero Day, which premiered its full six-episode season on Thursday, February 20, marking their first project together since 2001’s The Score. They’re joined by Connie Britton (a 9-1-1 reunion for her and Bassett even if they don’t share many scenes), Matthew Modine, Lizzy Caplan, Dan Stevens, and more, all of whom share what it was like to go toe-to-toe with De Niro in the TV Insider video interview above.
Zero Day asks the questions on everyone’s mind: How do we find truth in a world in crisis, one seemingly being torn apart by forces outside our control? And in an era rife with conspiracy theory and subterfuge, how much of those forces are products of our own doing, perhaps even of our own imagining?
De Niro stars as former President George Mullen, to whom Bassett’s President Evelyn Mitchell gives unprecedented — and arguably unconstitutional — power to arrest without warrants as the head of a special task force formed after a nationwide cyberattack kills thousands.
The whole nation is watching closely as Mullen and his team work to find the culprits of the attack. No one has a closer eye than Mullen’s own daughter, Alex, played by Caplan, but Stevens’ sensationalist YouTube show host, Evan Green, is also keeping a careful watch out of a devotion to his channel’s profits more than anything else. Britton plays Valerie, Mullen’s former chief of staff with whom he shares a secret past, and Modine is Speaker of the House Dreyer, who runs the Zero Day oversight committee with Alex.
All of the stars square up with De Niro in some of the show’s most important scenes. Bassett says that De Niro is “still as legendary, as wonderful, as brilliant as he was” 25 years ago. “And I was still just a little bit nervous as I was then, so a lot hasn’t changed other than we both ascended to the highest office in the land, president and former sitting and former president. But just as generous on screen and off as I remember.”
Britton was delighted by De Niro’s inquisitive nature as the movie star made the jump to TV and was “blown away” by his undying interest in the nitty-gritty details of acting. “He would ask me various things about what it is to be working in TV, you know, with the lines and the schedule,” she shares. “It was really lovely that he was deferential to our experience, even as we were, of course, so deferential to his experience. I just was watching him and really learning from him in every moment.”
Modine, Caplan, and Stevens all got their own personal invitations to work on scenes with De Niro in his Tribeca office and, for Caplan and costar Joan Allen (who plays her mother, the former first lady and judge who’s up for a Supreme Court nomination), his home upstate. They share what it was like to get that one-on-one time with the Oscar-winning star above. See the results of their scene studies in Zero Day.
Zero Day, Season 1 Available now, Netflix
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
