Robert De Niro is suiting up as President of the United States for the first time in his 50-year career, and his fictional leader draws apparent parallels to former President Joe Biden. Zero Day puts De Niro front and center as George Mullen, a former president who was cherished for his bipartisan support through his lone term in office. As Mullen attempts to enjoy retirement, a massive cyberattack ropes him back into a leadership position.
Mullen heads up the Zero Day Committee, a bureau created to track down the terrorists responsible for a minute-long nationwide power grid hack that claimed the lives of thousands of American citizens. While this is going on, Mullen begins to struggle with his mental state, regularly hearing “Who Killed Bambi” by Sex Pistols and hallucinating people thought to be dead.
Mullen’s situation mirrors that of former President Joe Biden. The 46th President of the United States struggled with a cognitive decline in the late stages of his term in office, resulting in him stepping down as the Democratic nominee in the 2024 election.
ScreenRant spoke with De Niro and series creator Eric Newman to discuss the similarities between Mullen and Biden as well as how Zero Day approaches the divide between canonizing American history and branching off into fiction.
Zero Day’s George Mullen’s Parallels To Joe Biden Were Coincidental
“All That Stuff Came Before What Actually Did Happen…”
Zero Day‘s George Mullen was written well before former President Biden’s cognitive decline was documented.
“No,” Robert De Niro told ScreenRant‘s Liam Crowley when asked if the real-world parallel was a conscious decision. “All that stuff came before what actually did happen with Biden. That was written [before Biden’s cognitive decline].”
Showrunner and series creator Eric Newman expanded on this, adding that Mullen’s characteristics were “already established” as reports of Biden’s mental state began to emerge.
“These were things that were happening while we were filming and we had already established these character traits, the idea that a former president was having cognitive issues that became a campaign issue during filming,” Newman added. “There are a number of things that may seem predictive at this point, but they weren’t. They just served our story.
“The point of it is that like us, this character of George Mullen, the mechanism by which he determines truth from fiction, is broken,” Newman continued. “And so he’s left to rely on things like integrity and compassion and deliberation and kindness and whatever else to make this decision. A lot of the things that came to pass, that now feel like they’re grabbed from the headlines and mirrored in our show, hadn’t happened when we wrote it. So that’s been a strange experience for me and the other writers.”
Where Does Zero Day Branch Into Fiction?
The Miniseries Includes Real American History In Its Canon
Outside of the implied parallels, a significant portion of Zero Day‘s canon is real American history. Ronald Reagan is mentioned as being a former president. 9/11 is an event that happened. Yet when a photograph of a rally dated to Summer 2020 is shown, there are no masks in sight, which raises the question of whether the COVID-19 pandemic happened in this story, and if not, where does Zero Day branch off from legitimate history and into narrative fiction?
“It was very important to us, always, that both sides of the American political spectrum are able to see this and embrace this and not feel like it’s an admonishment of one versus the other. I think we all have a very complicated relationship with the truth and in some cases, this is what the genesis of this project was,” Newman explained. “As [co-creator] Noah Oppenheim and I discussed in the fall of 2021 when we started talking about this, that we have retreated as a nation and perhaps as a civilization.”
Newman and company’s decision to root Zero Day in a real-world reality ultimately resulted in the legitimate American history getting fuzzier as the show got closer to the present day. This was done in an effort to avoid alienating any audience members.
“I think it goes beyond American borders into these alternate realities where two truths exist and they’re mutually exclusive of one another, and yet they have to coexist,” Newman continued. “We were careful to never identify political parties. If we mention people from the past, it’s very limited in a very limited way. Obviously, 9/11 happened in this universe for sure, but we avoid having some of those conversations that might immediately disqualify us by saying, ‘Oh, this is clearly not aimed at me.’ It is aimed at everyone.”
Stay tuned for our other Zero Day interviews with…
- Lizzy Caplan
- Joan Allen
- Matthew Modine & Lesli Linka Glatter
Zero Day is now streaming on Netflix.
