Fresh Air - Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

In the series Ripley, Andrew Scott plays a con artist with no conscience. The actor says it was important to humanize his character. "For me, I think your first job is to sort of advocate for the character and try not to judge them." Scott's up for a SAG Award for his portrayal of Tom Ripley.David Bianculli reviews Netflix's new six-part drama series Zero Day, starring Robert De Niro.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air, I'm David Bianculli. Today's guest, actor Andrew Scott, got noticed by many American TV viewers because of his role in the second season of the British comedy series, Fleabag. He played the so-called Hot Priest, who was torn between his vow of celibacy and his attraction to a woman who loves him.

Before that, Scott got rave reviews in another British series that made it to the US. Sherlock, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes. Before that, Scott got rave reviews in another British series that made it to the U.S. Sherlock, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes. Andrew Scott played the famed detective's nemesis, Moriarty. In the U.K., he starred in several acclaimed stage productions, including plays by Shakespeare and Chekhov. Terry spoke with Andrew Scott last year, and the reason we're returning to the interview is because he's been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for his starring performance in

the 2024 Netflix series Ripley. The SAG Awards ceremony is Sunday night. Ripley is based on the Patricia Highsmith novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, the first of several books about Tom Ripley, a con man with no conscience. He's a cold-blooded opportunist who most probably is a sociopath. Matt Damon played Ripley in a 1999 movie version, but the Netflix version written and directed by Steve Zalien is an even bigger and better adaptation.

It was beautifully photographed in various scenic cities. And Andrew Scott as Ripley carried almost every scene with a sense of mystery, magnetism, and maybe even a touch of madness. As the Netflix version begins, Ripley is scraping by on small-time hustles when a wealthy man tracks Ripley down and offers him an unusual proposition. The man believes that Ripley was a close college friend of the man's son, Dicky, and he offers to pay Ripley to go to Italy, visit Dicky at the villa

where he's living a layabout life with his girlfriend, and persuade him to return home to the States. Even though Ripley's friendship with Dicky was much more distant than the father presumed, Dicky accepts the assignment. But when he gets to Italy, and the villa, he wants it all for himself. The home on the beach, the fine art on the walls, Dickie's expensive watches and finely tailored clothes.

He begins plotting a way to assume Dickie's identity and step into his life. In this scene, Andrew Scott, Scott as Ripley is alone in Dickie's villa admiring the clothes in Dickie's closet. He tries them on, they fit nicely. And he also tries on Dickie's voice and mannerisms. He's sitting on the side of Dickie's bed pretending he's Dickie and also pretending that he's breaking up with Dickie's girlfriend. Marge, I'm sorry, but you gotta understand. I don't love you. We're friends.

That's all. Come on, don't. Don't cry. That's not gonna work, Marge. Stop it. Because you're interfering with Tom and me. No, no, no, no. It's not like that.

It's not that. We're not that. No, there's a bond between us. We're not that. No, there's a bond between us. Can you understand that? Or are you just going to keep making accusations? Can you understand anything? Come on, mind. It's not that.

Andrew Scott, welcome to Fresh Air. You are so terrific. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Oh, pleasure to be here, Terri. What did you need to know about the mind of Tom Ripley to play him? I mean, is he desperate for money? Is he a sociopath? Do you have to think about what his motivation is? sociopath and psychopath and monster, evil, villain, all those things sort of largely unhelpful. And really, I just kind of thought about the character in stages and like a lot of Shakespearean characters when they say when you play a Shakespearean king or something, you don't play the king, everybody else plays the king. So everybody's allowed to be as frightened and intimidated by Tom as they like,

and to diagnose him in whatever way they see fit. But for me, I think your first job is to sort of advocate for the character and try not to judge them. And so I try not to label him too much. And actually a lot of the challenges to sort of unlearn the stuff we might know from the character's reputation, to yank it back from the possession that the audience has of him. You mean from the previous film adaptation or from the book?

Yeah, the film adaptations and to think, okay, well, what do I read when I read these scripts? The scripts were really extraordinary and it's's an eight hour adaptation of the novel. So we have a sort of very particular opportunity in this one to spend an inordinate amount of time with a singular character, an opportunity that you don't normally get in television where you spend so much time with one, one character usually in television. It's maybe a couple or a family or a hospital or police department or whatever. Your eyes are so interesting in this series

because sometimes they're a little comical or but sometimes they are, and sometimes they're kind of threatening and other times they're just blank, like there's nothing going on. Yeah. Like they're dead and there's nothing going on behind them. And it strikes me though that must be hard to achieve since you're not dead inside.

You know, you have a conscience. Uh, can you talk a little bit about, um, going into that like dead inside blank state? So it's not necessarily that you would be playing nothing. And I think what's interesting about Tom Ripley is that we were watching this very brilliant person think and I think that's a great pleasure for an audience to watch a character, particularly an intelligent character, use his brain in a very particular way and to watch him make mistakes and to watch him go through all those stages. And so a little bit like what you're talking about, that blankness that might exist in

the audience's mind is actually just in the audience's mind and not necessarily a blankness that I'm consciously trying to conjure up. So I find that really interesting, the audience participation in performance. And I think some of the most interesting performances are where you invite the audience into a kind of complicity with you, you know, and they have to do a little bit of work. And conversely, the kind of less satisfying performances

are ones where you think, oh my God, we're being spoon fed everything here and we're left in absolutely no doubt as to what we should be thinking. So you're playing Tom Ripley, somebody who's hiding his real identity and assuming the identity of others. So he's always hiding who he is.

You must identify with that and why as an actor, because you're always playing somebody else. But also Patricia Highsmith, who wrote the novel that Ripley is adapted from, she was a lesbian and had to hide that because when she was writing, like you couldn't be out, there's no way. And you grew up in Dublin, and I think you were alive when homosexuality was against the law.

So, like she knew stuff about hiding, you knew stuff about hiding, you know, your identity, or you knew people who probably had to hide their identity. So, do you feel that sense of hiddenness in the portrayal? Yeah, I do. I absolutely do. She's definitely talking about murky times in society and a lot of the stuff is coded. And there's certainly stuff that she can't speak explicitly about. And I think she uses Tom Ripley as her sort of imp. She really adored the character. And so, yeah, I do understand that feeling of hiding.

There's something about this character that to me is quite elusive and possibly just secretive even to himself. Yeah, definitely. It seems like he's definitely secretive to himself. Yeah. There are so many of us, and I think this is the reason why the character is so enduring, that are strangers to ourselves, you know, that we do things that aren't necessarily murderous, but that we do things that aren't necessarily murderous, but that we do things we think, I have absolutely no idea where that came from, or there's parts of us that are mysterious to ourselves. And I think that's true of Tom. He certainly works as a

con artist, and I think he's fluid. He's a kind of fluid character and he certainly isn't a natural born killer and he certainly isn't a natural murderer. He doesn't like blood. He's invited to go to this with this task. It's not something that he seeks out himself. But to me, I think a lot of what she's talking about is class. You know, we see this very talented, isolated man who has been given no access to any of the beautiful things in life, despite being extremely gifted. And he lives in a rat-filled boarding house in the Lower East Side.

And then he's transplanted to a beautiful country where these very entitled people with half the talent that he has are exposed to everything. And I think a sort of rage emerges in him that he's hitherto sort of unaware of. And I think it also might unearth a sort of sexuality within him, possibly, that he's uncomfortable with and an envy and a kind of passion. The film is shot in black and white and it's really exquisite. Like every shot could be a beautiful still photograph if you just, you know, stopped it and look at the frame.

And I'm wondering what it was like to shoot that way, because just setting up the lighting and the composition, it's so carefully and artfully done. So did that mean a lot of time waiting for you? It absolutely did. Yeah. Yeah, it did. Yeah.

Did you have to be aware of exactly how the lighting was so the shadows would fall exactly right? To a certain extent, I certainly knew that Steve Zehle, our director was very concerned with with, you know, how the imagery looked. And he was very fastidious about that. So, yeah, it did involve a lot of waiting around. And one of the challenges of the of the character is, of course, that he's isolated. And, you know, we shot it towards the end of the pandemic. And I certainly think that the atmosphere on the set and in the world at the time definitely permeated

the feeling that I had in the process and probably in the performance to some degree. So you may be tired of talking about your role in Fleabag as a priest. No, not at all. As a priest. No, no role. Okay. As a priest torn between your commitment to the priesthood and your love for the main character, the woman nicknamed Fleabag, torn between your commitment to celibacy and your

own sexual desire. And you know, it starts Phoebe Waller-Bridge who also created and wrote it. She plays a single woman who really loves sex and has had a lot of partners, but isn't really in love until she meets you. And you're a priest who performs the ceremony for Flebeck's father's second marriage. She falls in love with you, you're drawn to her, but you're a priest.

You become good friends, and she started to hope that you'll leave the priesthood and be with her. And I wanna play a scene in which she's visiting you at the parish in the evening. And the scene starts inside and then moves outside. So we just did a bit of editing to edit together those two parts of the scene. So let's hear that.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag speaks first. So I read your book. Okay, great. Well, it's got some great twists. True. But I just, I couldn't help but notice just one or two little inconsistencies. Okay, sure. So the world was made in seven days, and on the first day light came, and then a few days later, the sun came.

Yeah, that's ridiculous. But you believe that? It's not fact, it's poetry, that's ridiculous. You believe that? It's not fact, it's poetry, it's moral code, it's for interpretation to help us work out God's plan for us. What's God's plan for you? I believe God meant for me to love people in a different way. I believe I'm supposed to love people as a father. We can arrange that. A father of many. I'll go up to three. It's not going to happen.

Two then. Okay, two. Do you think I should become a Catholic? No, don't do that. I like that you believe in a meaningless existence. And you're good for me. You make me question my faith. And?

I've never felt closer to God. That's Phoebe Wallabridge and my guest Andrew Scott. That's such a great role and such a great performance. Did you ever know a young priest as attractive as you were? That's very kind and also impossible to answer. Yeah, no, I completely adore Phoebe and... Well, wait, let's not avoid the question here. We'll take out the comparison to you so you don't have to worry about being humble here. But did you ever know a young, very attractive

priest? No, no. The priests that I knew were not young or attractive. Right. You were raised Catholic in Dublin. What was the role of the church in your life? Well I think it was a huge role in my life growing up. The culture is based on the Catholic Church. Ireland is a small country. I was at a Jesuit school. I'm not a practicing Catholic anymore, but certainly the culture around Catholicism is one that is very hard to dispel. And parts of it are wonderful. I think the sort of focus on community within the Catholic Church is really wonderful. And there's also, of course, the, you know, the huge amount of corruption and abuse that happened when I was growing up in the nineties. I remember what, you know, driving to school, my father would drive me to school in the mornings and we would listen

to the news in the morning. And, you know, my very strong memory is of just a whole litany of abuse cases within the Catholic Church just coming out every morning. So sexual abuse? Sexual abuse, and not just sexual abuse, but infidelity within marriages and marriages where people would be, you know, having affairs with priests and, with priests, but mainly sexual abuse. Were you really angry with the church for having so many hypocrites in positions of religious power? You talk about the priests who were accused of sexual abuse and infidelity entering other people's marriages.

And you're gay, I don't know how old you are when you realize that maybe all your life. But like I said, in the Republic of Ireland, being gay was against the law until I think 1993, I think that's when it was repealed. And the church condemned it and yet you have these priests are you know abusing boys and having affairs with women and men probably so how did you fit all these complicated feelings into your character of the priest in Fleabag

and it's a comedic role too, as we could hear from the scene, the scene that we played. And he's wrestling with the natural sexual desire that people have and love, physical expressions of love too. So it's not the abstinence that I have the problem with. It's the silence around the abstinence and the, the, the, the way that, um, people in position of power, silence, people who want to be able to talk about that. And so the reason that I found that character so cathartic is that, you know, when I first had the conversation with Phoebe, I don't want to play a sort of, um, a stereotype of somebody who is, uh, extreme in that way. This is a human being.

I think that's why we like that character because he does have a faith. I think it's a wonderful thing to be able to have romantic feelings and to also have faith and to be able to talk about the human struggle. And so I love the fact that this quite radical sexual kind of risk a series has at its center a real addressing for young people of what faith is, because I think there's a real gap in the for people of my generation who have been let down by the church and feel like it's not for them to have a still space is something that would be wonderful for them if they were made feel welcome. And I think that's perhaps why Flebag appealed to so many people, because it wasn't cynical. I think we tried to talk about religion in, of course, a humorous way, but also in a way

that isn't just too judgmental of the Catholic Church. Actually, this is a person who really is struggling and is a human being. And I love the fact that he questions his faith, but constantly stays with it. And that it's okay to question it. Like if your belief is deep enough, it's okay to challenge it and question it and remain committed. Yes, exactly. Remain committed. So, yeah. Yes, exactly, remain committed. Exactly, that to see that struggle,

like in any relationship, in a marriage, you think, this is tough, this relationship is hard, how do I keep it going, how do I talk about it? It's not just blind devotion the whole time in any relationship, you question it, and it's how you approach those crises that makes us honorable and courageous. And that's a wonderful thing to be able to convey and also, of course, just to just address.

Did any priests give you feedback on your role in Fleabag? Yeah, they did, actually. I had really, really positive feedback from priests. I had really, really positive feedback from priests. I think because they, like all of us, like to see themselves represented in a sort of fair way and that they're not just these pious, flawless people. I think most of the feedback I got was really, really wonderful. Andrew Scott speaking to Terry Gross last year. He's nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for his starring role in the 2024 Netflix series Ripley.

The SAG Awards are Sunday evening and will be presented live on Netflix. After a break, we'll hear more of their interview and I'll review Zero Day, a new Netflix series starring Robert De Niro. I'm David B. Kuhle and this is Fresh Air. Donald Trump is back in the White House and making a lot of moves very quickly. Keep track of everything going on in Washington with the NPR Politics Podcast. Every day we break down the latest news and explain why it matters

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we take the news and boil it down to three essential stories you can keep up without feeling stressed out. Listen to the Up First podcast from NPR. When she teaches her students how to write a song, musician Scarlett Keys says they need to ask themselves certain questions. What is the thing that keeps you up at night? What's the thing you can't stop thinking about?

As songwriters, we are repurposing human tropes and a new viewpoint with new words, with new music. The people and technology behind the soundtracks of our lives. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. I want to ask you about your recent film, All of Us Strangers, in which you play a screenwriter in London living in a screenwriter in London,

living in a new high-rise building. And there's only one other unit that seems to have anyone living in it. So it's this shiny and eerily empty new building. The other resident, played by Paul Meskell, turns out to be gay like your character. And you develop an intimate relationship. At the same time, you return to the town where you were raised,

and the people who you meet there are your parents, but we, the audience, don't know that immediately because they're the same age you are. Once we realize, wait, that's his parents, like I was thinking like, this is terrible casting. The parents are the same age as the son. What went wrong here? But then you realize the parents were in a car accident when your character was 11 years old and you've gone back either in your mind or physically to talking with them and trying to bridge the gap of the man you've become, this green rider, the man who is gay with the child who they knew and all the things you couldn't tell them and couldn't talk about then and are just like dying to tell them now you know

having the conversations you always wish you'd had had they been alive are your parents still alive my mother died three weeks ago oh no I'm so sorry. Thank you. Are you okay? I'm okay now, as a response speaking, I'm okay. Oh, I'm so sorry. I was going to ask you, and I'm not sure if this is anything you'd care to talk about knowing now what I know. As you were playing that, wanted to have conversations with your parents

that you never had. And now I'm hoping that you had the conversations. I feel very lucky that I feel that there was nothing that I needed to say to my mom, or I feel there was nothing that she needed to say to me that was left unsaid. So I feel very grateful for that. Is your father still alive? Yeah, yeah. And is he okay?

My father's okay. All right. One of the things about playing this role, it's one of the films in which you show your ability to be silent and still convey a lot. There's I think about I timed it. There's about 14 minutes where the camera is mostly on you and on your face or you're walking and not you don't say a word for like 14 minutes.

Wow, is it really? I think that's really fascinating for audiences to watch. I think audiences love to to watch characters think and feel and, you know, so much of what we say is less important than what we convey. And that's one of the things I love about acting is that you don't what you're what you say accounts for certain amount of things. But actually, a lot of the time we're saying things

while we're feeling some other things. That's the way, that's really representative, I think, of the way human beings behave. That's a really good point. Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of, that's what happens a lot. It's like, it's just the way we are. One of my favorite lines in the movie is actually said by Paul Maskell, who says, I was a fat kid and when you're fat, people don't ask why you don't have a girlfriend. I thought like, oh, that gets you so much. Yeah. It's brilliant.

It's so truthful. The screenplay was so incredibly truthful. I love the fact that it's sort of that film has really, I love the fact that the way films are distributed now, that they get to a really, really wide audience. And it's really affected so many different types of people because everybody has a relationship with their parents, whether their parents are alive or not, or whether they are parents themselves.

Everybody at some point has a relationship with them, whether they're in their lives or not, or whether they're a parent or not. So, and I think most people have a relationship with falling in love. And so I love the fact that that film, because it's sort of unusual, there's a dreamlike quality to it, sort of is able to tap into huge swathes of different experiences.

I think it's really special, that film. Andrew Scott speaking to Terry Gross last year. More after a break, this is Fresh Air. There is a lot happening right now in the world of economics. You may have heard about the president's desire for a sovereign wealth fund. If your country's small, well governed, and has a surplus, it is probably a good idea. We are not any of those. We're here to cover federal buyouts, the cost of deportation, and so much more. Tune in to NPR's The

Indicator from Planet Money. There's been a lot of attention on loneliness lately. 16% of Americans report feeling lonely all or most of the time. The former Surgeon General even declared a loneliness epidemic. On It's Been a Minute, we're launching a new series called All the Lonely People, diving deep into how loneliness

shows up in our lives and how our culture shapes it. That's on the It's Been A Minute podcast on NPR. I think you first became known in the US in Sherlock, the BBC series that played in the US as well, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and you as his nemesis Moriarty. Um, so I want to play a scene from season one, and this is the firstatch as Sherlock Holmes and you as his nemesis Moriarty. So I want to play a scene from season one and this is the first scene where Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty meet face to face and Moriarty has lured

Sherlock to rescue his friend Watson who's been outfitted with an explosive vest. So Sherlock is pointing a gun at you during this entire exchange and your character Moriarty speaks first. Do you know what happens if you don't leave me alone, Sherlock? To you. Oh, let me guess, I get killed. Kill you? No, don't be obvious. I mean, I'm gonna kill you anyway, someday. I don't want to rush it, though. I'm saving it up for something special. No, no, no, no, no. If you don't want to rush it though. I'm saving it up for something special. No, no, no, no, no. If you don't stop prying,

I'll burn you. I will burn the heart out of you. I have been reliably informed that I don't have one. But we both know that's not quite true. Well, I better be off. Well, it's so nice to have had a proper chat. What if I was to shoot you now? Right now? Then you could cherish the look of surprise on my face.

Because I'd be surprised, Sherlock. Really, I would. And just a teensy bit disappointed. And of course, you wouldn't be able to cherish it for very long. Ciao, Sherlock Holmes. Catch you... later. No, you won't. So you play Moriarty big and smirky, sinister and funny. What was your audition like? My audition was incredibly fun.

Just the day before, I knew that they were auditioning people to play Moriarty and their original idea was that this character would appear almost like just an image and it would say something like, hello Sherlock, and that would be the end of the series. But then when they realized that lots of actors coming into audition just saying, hello, Sherlock doesn't give them much of an idea of the actors range, you know, for future series if they cast this actor. So they quickly wrote, Stephen Moffat, the writer, quickly wrote that scene,

which eventually appeared as the scene we've just listened to, as an audition scene for actors to read in the audition. They sent it maybe, I don't know, the night before the audition and I thought, wow, this is really fun. I was aware that I didn't look like a villain at the time. I had quite a boyish face and know, boyish face and stuff. And so I took great, great pleasure in frightening them. And I knew in the audition that they were amused, but also that they were scared.

Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Um, were you able to tap into a place in yourself that you thought could scare people? Yeah, yeah. I was. I feel like one of the things that I feel quite fortunate about is that I feel quite near my emotions, you know. I feel that's stood me in good stead as an actor. I feel like it's an enormously, I don't know, it feels healthy to me to be able to access that part of you but not really

do any harm, you know. Yeah, it's a funny thing, isn't it, to be an actor? Yeah, yeah. I want to move on to Hamlet. You got an Olivier Award, I think, right, for The Oprah Trail? No? I might have, yeah. You might have, okay. For, for, for the Oprah trail? I, I, I might have. Yeah.

I, I, I, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How am I supposed to know if you don't know? Yeah. Well, I don't know. How am I supposed to know if you don't know? Well, anyways, you were acclaimed.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You were acclaimed. People liked it. People liked it. Yeah. Um, so, um, you've spoken about how you wanted to make the language understandable so often, especially

for Americans who sometimes have to work hard just to grasp a British accent when spoken quickly or spoken with a regional British accent. And of course, so much of the language in Shakespeare is language that we no longer use, it's archaic. But you really wanted to make every word understandable. So I went on YouTube to see if I could find anything and I found you doing part of the to be or not to be soliloquy, which is of course the most famous part.

And it was so interesting because, you know, Hamlet is really like thinking through like, should I live or should I end my life? I don't know. And what's the worst that can happen if I die? What would that be like? And of course he's using very elevated poetic language to say all of that, but you say it like really slowly.

There are so many like long pauses in between, for instance, to be long pause or not to be. And on the one hand, I felt like, wow, that's a lot of pauses. And on the other hand, I felt like, well, every word is ringing out and I'm kind of hearing things I hadn't heard before. So can you describe your thoughts about those pauses and why you took them and where you took them. I suppose the thing about the pauses is that he's thinking, am I gonna live or am I gonna die? And we're seeing that live and your job

is to not play the famous speech. Your job is to just, that speech wasn't written to be famous, it was just written to be authentic. And this is somebody who's thinking, am I going to do this or am I not going to do this? And nobody's watching him. So why wouldn't he take his time? A lot of the language is archaic,

but a lot of words that we still use today were invented by Shakespeare. So I have this real passion about Shakespeare that it shouldn't be kidnapped by academics. It's something that's very actable. For young actors, if you really examine it and you're not intimidated and you're not told this isn't for you, then actually it should be really, really accessible. You may not understand every single word, but in the same way you may not understand or get every word in a rap song, you understand that there's a musicality to it and there's a feeling that you have to get and that could be witty or it could be contemplative or it could be whatever

it is. And it's incredibly actable and also how Hamlet is incredibly funny. And so it was just like with all things is just to be able to, to ignore the famousness of the play. In fact, we had a thing in rehearsal called the famous play buzzer where you're like, are we just doing this is because everybody knows this is what you would do. Like Hamlet's father appears to him as a ghost at the beginning of the story. And we don't know, we should unlearn the fact that we don't know that that character could be in that character only appears fleetingly. But we know that we don't know that that character could be in that character only appears fleetingly. But we know that probably because we know the place so well that actually that he just

appears to him and then he sort of he goes for the majority of the play. But for a 16 year old who's watching it, they don't know that this character isn't going to be by his side for the rest of the rest of the rest of the show. So you have to unlearn what you already know about the famousness of the play in the same way you have to unlearn all the stuff that you know about Tom Ripley or James Moriarty or any anything that you know you know you're when you're reinterpreting you know a famous a famous story. So I found all that really interesting and all the stuff about Hamlet to me is fascinating

because people say, oh, he's the dark prince and he's wearing, you know, the inky black cloak and blah, blah, blah. But actually this is just a guy, which I, you know, I very much understand at the moment, which is a guy who's in mourning. His father has died very, very recently. So the question is that you don't drown that character in just, oh, he's just a dark, depressing guy. Where was his lightness? And so I feel like you always have to go towards the lightness when you're dealing with tragedy and a little bit like Fleabag, then you, when you're dealing

with comedy, you to look for the soul. And that's what I think the great art or certainly the art that I am interested in, you know, has a bit of both because that's the way we are as human beings. You know, we like a bit of both. We laugh on the saddest day of our life and we cry, you know, in the middle of a brunch when we don't think we're going to.

That's always, it's always within us all the time, the potential to go in either direction. Andra Scott, I want to thank you so much for talking with us. You know, your face changes from role to role. Can you pass unrecognized on the street? I can, yeah. Yeah, I can. Sometimes. Right, sometimes. Yeah, do you use any kind of disguise? Right, sometimes. Do you use any kind of disguise? It depends. I'm very lucky. I can walk the streets pretty easily. We'll see how long that lasts.

I think I've been saying that for a while, so hopefully I'll be able to duck and dive into the future. Well, congratulations on Ripley, and thank you so much for being with us. Thank you so much for having me. Andrew Scott speaking with Terry Gross last year. He's nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for his starring role in the Netflix series Ripley based on the best-selling Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. The SAG awards take place Sunday night and will be streamed live on Netflix. Coming up, I review the new Netflix series Zero Day, a political thriller starring Robert De Niro. This is Fresh Air.

Planet money is there. From California's most expensive fires ever. That was my home, mom. Yeah. I grew up there. It's ashes. To the potentially largest deportation in US history. They're going to come to the businesses. They're going to come to the restaurants. They're going to come here. Planet Money.

We go to the places at the center of the story. The Planet Money podcast from NPR. Bella DiPaolo is glad if you're happily married, but she is perfectly happy being single. I would love to have someone who took care of my car or someone who cleaned up the dishes after dinner, but then I'd want them to leave. From yourself to your dog to your spouse are significant others. That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Robert De Niro has been a movie star for more than 50 years and still is. But occasionally, very occasionally, he also pops up as an actor on television. For NBC,

he was a guest star on one episode of 30 Rock and appeared close to ten times on Saturday Night Live. For HBO, he starred in the Wizard of Lies, Barry Levinson's made-for-TV movie about Bernie Madoff. And two years ago, he appeared in and narrated a little-known five-episode Argentinian TV miniseries called Nada, playing the American friend of a caustic Buenos Aires food critic. Except for De Niro's contributions, Nada is subtitled. It's also very funny, delightful in its playful approach to both food and language, and available to stream on Hulu.

Thanks to Netflix, another entry has just been added to Robert De Niro's TV resume. He's starring in Zero Day, a new six-part political thriller about a chilling cyber-terrorist attack on the United States. With no warning and no explanation, all the electronic and computerized systems in the country stop working for precisely one minute, resulting in widespread havoc, unchecked panic, and during those 60 seconds thousands of deaths. When systems are restored, everyone with a cell phone receives the same frightening text message.

This will happen again. That makes part of Zero Day a mystery, a thriller, and a race against time, with the President of the United States forced to act quickly against an unknown, unseen enemy. But it's also a political drama, with various factions inside Congress and in the media stoking panic or using the crisis to advance their own personal agendas. It deals with abuse of power, political overreach and questionable decisions. Subjects that make Zero Day almost mind-blowingly topical. In this TV drama after the cyber attack, there's a lot of anger and paranoia

and finger pointing and division. And that's where De Niro comes in. He plays former President George Mullen, one of the last leaders popular on both sides of the political spectrum. His former chief of staff, played by the always impressive Jesse Plemons, visits Mullen right after the cyber attack. He urges him to make a public appearance at a New York City disaster site where survivors may be trapped under the rubble to help calm things down. An angry crowd, fed by conspiracy theories and blaming the current administration, is pushing against police barricades when the former president arrives and spontaneously

addresses the crowd. TV cameras already are there, and Mullen's impromptu remarks are shown relayed on live TV throughout the nation as a rare and welcome voice of reason. Hey, hey, please! What's the matter with you? This is exactly what they want us to do. Whose name, Mullen? We don't even know who they are.

You're right. I don't know who they are, neither do you. None of us do. But if we keep shouting at each other like this, what are we going to accomplish? We're Americans. What are we doing? We're supposed to be standing up for each other. We're supposed to be helping each other. What, you think you're doing the right thing? No, you're not.

You're afraid. And you think if you get worked up over some conspiracy nonsense that that won't make you afraid? No. You're not behaving like an American, nor a patriot. You're here standing up for the little guy, the working man? Well, there are working men and women buried right beneath our feet, right here. You don't trust the government? I get that. It hasn't always come through for everybody, but this isn't about the government or the 1% or whatever

the hell you want to call them. It's about somebody out there that hates us, that stands against everything that we stand for, everything that makes us who we are. And they found a way to hurt us. It's that simple. And right now, these people need to get back to work and get those people out. And you need to let them. You want to stand by and offer your support and your prayers?

That's great, but please, just do it from behind the barricade. Because of that performance, Mullen is summoned immediately to the Oval Office by the current president, played by Angela Bassett. He doesn't know it, but she's about to appoint him to head a very powerful, potentially unconstitutional task force.

Usually, a zero-day vulnerability exists on a single operating system, your iPhone say. But this thing exploited unknown vulnerabilities across dozens of systems. It shut those systems off for exactly one minute and then turned everything back on again. So that wasn't us. No.

We had barely gotten our people into it when everything came back online. There was no ransom demand, nobody claimed responsibility, nothing like that. Just that insidious threat. We're running shifts at me trying to sort through a digital trail that is basically the Gordian Knot.

So what's the plan? Congress is authorizing a special investigatory commission and endowing it with extraordinary powers commensurate with the scale of this emergency. They will be granting this Commission powers of surveillance, powers of search and seizure, if necessary even the suspension of habeas corpus. Jesus Evelyn, we didn't even do that after 9-11. This is

different. We knew who did it then. We have no clue here and no time to spare. We need an entity with all the powers of every law enforcement and intelligence agency put together operating on American soil. You're just going to grab people off the streets without warrants. Actually, you are. The supporting players in Zero Day, in addition to Plemons and Bassett, include other top-tier actors. Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Lizzie Kaplan, Matthew Modine, Dan Stevens, Bill Camp. All of them are actors I've raved about in the past, and they all contribute strongly to this miniseries.

And while Zero Day is a work of fiction, it's structured to make it easy to draw parallels to real life events and figures. There's a right-wing media figure stirring up trouble, an elderly politician whose mental faculties may be slipping, Russian operatives and Silicon Valley billionaires in the shadows, and so on. And on Zero Day, the scripted events of this TV miniseries are relayed by actual news people

portraying themselves, including Wolf Blitzer, Savannah Guthrie, and Nicole Wallace. Behind the scenes, the creators and co-writers of Zero Day include Wallace's husband, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, and Noah Oppenheim, former president of NBC News. Their narrative, also written with Eric Newman of the TV series Narcos, builds nicely and with very little predictability. One element missing is humor. There's hardly a drop of it in the entire show. But the story escalates dramatically, like such recent TV political thrillers as The Agency and The Diplomat.

And all six episodes of Zero Day are directed by Leslie Linka Glatter, who worked on both Homeland and Mad Men. She uses images in a way that conjures their own sense of mystery and adds to the intensity of Zero Day. As do all the actors from De Niro on down. So add Netflix's Zero Day to your streaming list and while you're at it add Hulu's Nada, two very different De Niro performances but two very good television programs.

One quick production note. On last week's show, when we saluted the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, I made a mistake in my introduction. I said that the show's producer, Lorne Michaels, had offered comedian George Carlin the chance to be permanent host of the show, but he suggested a rotating host approach instead and hosted only the premier episode. It was the right story but the wrong comedian. Lorne Michaels actually had made that offer to another comic who appeared on that first show, Albert Brooks. It was Brooks who suggested the rotating hosts and it was I who misremembered it and made the mistake. I apologize for the error. I apologize for the error.

On Monday's show, the Catholic Church has been described as the world's last true monarchy, with enormous power concentrated in the Vatican. Philip Sheenan talks about the last seven popes, and how efforts to reform the Church with the Second Vatican Council led to decades-long doctrinal debates and power struggles. Sheenan's book is Jesus Wept. Join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer.

Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld and Diana Martinez. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challener, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer

is Molly C. V. Nesbitt. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Biancullo. On the Throughline Podcast, the myth linking autism and vaccines was decades in the making and was a major moment for vaccine hesitancy in America Tapping into fears involving the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government no matter how many studies you do showing that this is not a problem It's very hard to unring the bell listen to through line from NPR wherever you get your podcast