Paradise Episode 7, “The Day,” should come with its own very specific trigger warning — something along the lines of, “If you’re already anxious about the current state of the world, the future implications of climate change, and humanity as a whole, take a moment to ensure you’re emotionally prepared to watch. And whatever you do, don’t put this on right before bed.” (I learned that last part the hard way.)
The first six episodes of Dan Fogelman’s hit Hulu series, Paradise, introduced viewers to the Colorado billionaire bunker where 25,000 people — including Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson), Dr. Gabriela Torabi (Sarah Shahi), Secret Service agents Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom), Robinson (Krys Marshall), Xavier (Sterling K. Brown), and the late president Cal Bradford (James Marsden) — sought refuge from an extinction-level event. Though viewers witnessed flashbacks to characters’ pre-underground city lives before, we never knew the extent of the climate catastrophe that landed them there, or the root of Xavier’s resentment of Cal, until now.
In one of the year’s most captivating, intense, terrifying, and traumatizing television episodes, Paradise went full-on disaster movie to take us back to “The Day” when the world as we know it ended. After a supervolcano erupted under the Antarctic ice sheet, millions of tons of ash was expelled into the atmosphere. The explosion caused trillions of gallons of water to melt from the ice sheet, which triggered a 600 mph tsunami with 300-foot waves — but that’s not all! As governments scrambled to secure resources, Russia and China exchanged fire. Los Angeles experienced an 8.9 magnitude earthquake. And news that Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, and more countries had been destroyed trickled into the Oval Office.
As the world devolved into unprecedented chaos, the episode — written by John Hoberg and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa — chronicled the White House’s response through an ambitious, well-executed, eerily timely production that remarkably showcased Marsden and Brown’s talents.
After realizing they didn’t have the necessary foresight to properly ready themselves — or the country — for the worst-case scenario, a tormented Cal reluctantly made the call to put the bunker plan in motion. He knocked back some booze to help mask his nerves and recorded an overly-optimistic address for the nation while those around him unraveled. The on-screen tension was palpable, the fear was relatable, and Marsden confirmed the those feelings rang true on set as well.
“It was challenging, for sure. Because you’re sitting there hoping that the audience is on board at this point, and you’re also thinking this is so unfathomable, what we’re witnessing,” the actor said about filming Episode 7. “You’re standing there in disbelief. So there was a weird, eerie vibe on set that day. It wasn’t unpleasant, I could just tell every person in all the scenes we shot through that whole episode were privately thinking, ‘What would I be doing in this situation? What kind of person would I be? What would I choose? What would be important to me?’ And so it was a real reflection as we were shooting these scenes.”
As Cal struggled to process the looming apocalyptic event, his attention kept wandering to Jeffrey, a janitor who was going about business as usual in the hallway. After defying orders and breaking from his security team to speak to the longtime employee, Cal raced back to his office to record a truthful, un-sugarcoated warning for the American people — including staffers he was forced to leave behind — so they’d know to spend the time they had left with loved ones. The humanity, hurt, and helplessness Marsden portrayed in “The Day” is some of his best acting to date, in part, because the potential for catastrophe resonated so deeply.
“There was a heaviness on set, because it was like, ‘Are we too far away from this?’” Marsden asked. (Paradise premiered on Hulu weeks after wildfires devastated Los Angeles, a tragedy that left the cast — especially those based in LA — feeling the same terror and heartbreak they portrayed on-screen.) “There was a real determination to get the scenes right, to make [viewers] feel the importance and the level of threat and the sadness of all of it,” Marsden told Decider. “There were definitely more fun scenes to shoot than those, but they were also gratifying in their own really specific way.”
“There was a heaviness on set, because it was like, ‘Are we too far away from this?’”
James Marsden, Paradise
Though Cal did his best to bring people together in crisis, he failed to unite Xavier and his wife Teri (Enuka Okuma) despite promising to pick her up in Atlanta should disaster strike. While Xavier helped manage tensions at the White House and protect Cal, he spent the episode frantically checking his phone and attempting to guide his wife to safety. When it became clear that Teri wouldn’t make the plane to the bunker, Xavier and Cal unleashed hours of pent-up fear and stress in an exhausting tarmac screaming match.
The standout scene featured award-worthy performances from the Paradise duo, with Brown tapping into This Is Us-level emotional depth and Marsden putting Cal’s charm and sense of humor on the back-burner to flex his serious acting chops.
Brown switched into supportive dad and husband mode for the remainder of the episode, somberly holding his kids on the flight and saying a tearful goodbye to his wife over the phone. While his powerhouse acting is ceaselessly affecting, it’s no secret that he’s extraordinarily talented in the tearjerker department — a truth that motivated Marsden to step up in scenes like the above. “I’d never been more prepared in my life, I don’t think, than for this this job. The reason for that was I felt a duty to the writing and the material to deliver. But also I didn’t want to be average in front of Sterling,” Marsden said. “I mean, the guy’s just a force. And I know that if I stepped up, we’d have the potential to to do something really special with these scenes…I think there was this unspoken understanding that you get the assignment. I get the assignment. We don’t even need to talk about this scene. Let’s just do it.”
When tasked with launching nuclear weapons or sparing civilization and knocking out all power and communications, Marsden stepped up to show another astonishing display of fortitude from Cal. He launched the more humane failsafe in hopes of giving people like Teri (who we learn is still alive at the end of Episode 7) a chance at survival; another brave, empathetic move that made Marsden reevaluate himself as human.
“It’s a good process to wake up every day and ask yourself what kind of person you want to be. I think this show presents these characters with an extreme situation where you’re forced to make choices about what’s important to you. That’s the takeaway for me. At the end of it all, what truly matters to you? What is a value to you? It just pulled that into focus more than than usual,” the Paradise star explained. “I never want to be anybody who looks back and with too much regret or a feeling that I could have done better, or I could have done the right thing when I knew it was the right thing to do.”
Throughout the series, but especially during “The Day,” Marsden allowed himself to feel the true weight of Paradise‘s writing. “I think the audience is going to hold a mirror up to themselves… I know I did the same thing shooting it,” he explained. “I think it makes you reevaluate what is important to you and how you want to treat people and what will you do when everything that matters to you is in jeopardy. And what really matters when all of those things you think you cared about all of a sudden potentially have no value at all.”
New episodes of Paradise premiere Tuesdays on Hulu.
