Jude Law has been chatting about making 2011’s Contagion, and the warning he was given during shooting the film.
A spoiler for the end of Contagion lies within
Jude Law has been conversing with GQ (via The Hollywood Reporter) about his career in a new interview. In that conversation, he’s revealed that whilst shooting the startlingly prescient Steven Soderbergh drama Contagion, based on the outbreak of a global pandemic originating from China, he was warned by scientific experts assisting the production that a catastrophe of the kind that the film portrayed was an eventual certainty.
As we know all too well, nine years after the film’s release, the Covid-19 outbreak would ravage the globe, in many ways following the pattern set out in Soderbergh’s film. For Law, whose conspiracy-theorist character trumpeted fake cures (something else we’ve seen occur), he claims that on set the conventional wisdom was that a pandemic was a surety, according to scientific experts, writer Scott Z. Burns and Soderbergh himself, who had researched the topic in forensic detail.
Says Law, “there was absolutely the sense that this was going to happen, the great scientists on set with us who had worked with Scott, the writer and Steven were very learned and experienced individuals who knew what to expect. And they all said to us that this was going to happen — and it was a case of when rather than if. The way they described it, which is exactly as it has happened, just made sense. What’s scary is you learn in a set like that because you’re being advised by experts, but it doesn’t necessarily sit.”
Although Law was initially alarmed, his fears eventually subsided, although when he heard of events coming out of China at the turn of the year, he claims he knew what was about to happen, stating: “when 2020 started, and we heard about what was initially happening in China, what fast became apparent around the world, it rang alarm bells,” he said. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t hugely surprised.”
Contagion ends of course, with a vaccine being discovered and the world slowly returning to normal. Fingers crossed…
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