‘Zero Day’ Political Consultant Eric Schultz on Working With Robert De Niro and How Oranges Became ‘Consequential’ in the Storyline

variety.com:

Marc Malkin Senior Editor, Culture and Events Eric Schultz knows his way around the White House. He served as deputy White House press secretary during the Obama administration from 2014 to 2017.

It’s one of the reasons that he now frequently consults on Hollywood projects about Washington. His latest gig was helping the cast and creatives get everything right in “Zero Day,” the Netflix political thriller about a former president (Robert De Niro) who is pulled out of retirement by the current commander-on-chief (Angela Bassett) to investigate a worldwide cyber attack. “The producers called because they wanted somebody on set for the filming of the White House scenes, and they wanted someone who had been in the actual White House to help inform how those conversations and meetings and discussions would take place, whether it was in the Oval Office or the Press Briefing Room,” Schultz tells me.

He even helped with props. Presidents usually have a bowl of treats on the Oval Office coffee table – Ronald Regan famously offered jellybeans while Barack Obama had apples and Joe Biden had chocolate chips on hand.

In “Zero Day,” Schultz helped decide that Bassett’s character would have a bowl of oranges. “They became consequential later on because the speaker of the house [Matthew Modine] peels an orange when he’s in her office as a flex during one of their heated conversations,” Schultz recalls. What was it like telling Robert De Niro how to do something? I will say Bob was very focused on making sure he got things right and being as authentic as he could be in the role.