Why Andrea Riseborough's Mob Boss is a New Kind of TV Antihero
Adam Rathe
,Town & Country•March 11, 2020
Andrea Riseborough isn’t like any crime-family heavy you’ve ever seen. In the new Amazon series ZeroZeroZero, the actress—you know her from Madonna's W.E., Battle of the Sexes and Birdman—plays Emma Lynwood, the eldest daughter of a prominent New Orleans shipping tycoon. Emma would have her hands full in her role running the family company if it were all above board, but considering the operation is tied up with Mexican drug dealers and the Italian mob thanks to a shipment of cocaine they’re running between the two, it’s an especially tense time. And that’s just where things get started.
The series, which is airing now and co-stars Gabriel Byrne and Dane DeHaan, is based on a novel of the same name by the Italian writer Roberto Saviano which delves into the incredible size and power of the global cocaine trade. It was created for television by Stefano Sollima, whose own experience with edgy dramas (Gomorrah, Sicario: Day of the Soldado) pairs perfectly with a subject that’s dark and dangerous and fascinating to watch.
Saviano’s books are usually huge hits and they’ve made him a target for the Italian gangsters he often writes about. Were you familiar with this one before coming to the series?
I hadn’t read the book. My first connection was to Stefano, our director. I hadn’t seen a script yet, but I met him, and he walked me through the whole series. The book is partly a novel but it’s also journalistic, which is to say it’s full of facts, but the author uses his imagination to fill in the gaps. I thought a lot about committing to spending a year and a bit with such a male cast and the reality that I might not get to work with other women very often. I really had to think about whether I wanted to do that. Ultimately I did and I thought how wonderful to step up and occupy that space of being in a crime family as a woman. It felt authentic to me, so I was excited to be part of it.
Was her role as part of a crime syndicate the main appeal? What else about the character spoke to you?
The series traces a shipment of cocaine from exactly where it comes from through how it gets to North America. Emma is the point person to make that happen. The interesting thing about the character is that I didn’t know what was coming—the later episodes weren’t written yet. I didn’t know what her story would be when I started. All of which is to say, there wasn’t an arc that appealed to me because there wasn’t yet an arc. In fact, there wasn’t yet a character. The book is about a world, but not about these specific characters. The book is a journalistic novel, the series is a world in which we imagine real characters living in the circumstances the book explains. They don’t contradict one another.
In making a series about the global drug trade, you really did go global. You filmed for more than a year and went all over the world. Is that unusual for a project like this?
I’m always traveling. I rarely make films where I live. The unique thing about shooting this was that our units would have to complete relocate after a bit of time. We were in New Orleans and then Mexico City and Calabria. Then we split and half of the crew stayed in Italy when the rest of us went to Morocco for six months. We ended up in Senegal for a month at the end. It was epic.
One of the most fascinating things about the series is that somewhere in a club on a Friday night, somebody’s consuming a line of cocaine and what this series does is backtrack to all the lives that has touched—the people who’ve thrived, the people who’ve died, all the different people who have been impacted by that particular bit of cocaine. It’s not sensationalized. What this piece does is give you an idea of how vast the drug trade is and how we all, knowingly or not, stand on its shoulders.
