‘Zero Day’ Star Lizzy Caplan on That Big Finale Twist, Sparring With Robert De Niro and the Enduring Legacy of ‘Mean Girls’

variety.com:

Max Gao SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from all six episodes of “Zero Day,” now streaming on Netflix.

Lizzy Caplan always knew that her character, Congresswoman and former First Daughter Alexandra Mullen, was behind the catastrophic cyberattack that incited the existential and moral panic that runs through “Zero Day.” It’s a plot twist that comes in the early minutes of the finale of Netflix’s latest political thriller, which stars Robert De Niro (in his first major TV role) as President Robert Mullen, an aging, populist former leader who comes out of retirement to run a commission tasked with investigating the devastating nationwide outage.

As far as when she found out about her character’s villainy, she says: “I think it was probably before I read the scripts. I may not have been as aware of the magnitude of her role in it.

Maybe I thought there were going to be other people who were involved, but I didn’t realize how much of it was going to be Alex.” In a heated confrontation with her father inside her apartment, Alex comes clean about how the Zero Day attack came from within the highest levels of government — and how it all went terribly wrong.