Amanda Sandford is a New York City advertising executive who desperately needs a break from the real world and the people occupying her busy life. On a whim, she books a weekend family getaway in a gorgeous house on Long Island with her husband and two kids — but her vacation bliss is soon spoiled when the owners arrive in the middle of the night, seeking to hunker down in the midst of a blackout. Though she comes across as privileged and shortsighted at times, Amanda is a no-nonsense woman who’s able to put her stubbornness aside when it comes to protecting her family. 

Known for her award-winning performances in Erin Brockovich and Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts brings a natural charm to her portrayal of Amanda. She also serves as a producer on the film. “She's just a wildly challenging character,” Roberts told Netflix of Amanda. “She’s complicated and surprising, and the main reason I took on this role — aside from wanting to work with Sam Esmail again — was the challenge. There are a lot of fine lines in making her understood, but not too unlikeable.”

Esmail, who had previously directed Roberts in 2018’s Homecoming, knew immediately that “Amanda was Julia.”

“What’s really great about casting someone like Julia Roberts is that you don’t have to worry about the likeability factor,” he told Netflix. “Julia has the uncanny ability to channel the humanity out of any character, regardless of how flawed they may be.”

Pretty Woman, Erin Brockovich, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Eat Pray Love, Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, Closer, Runaway Bride, Steel Magnolias, Notting Hill

G.H. Scott is a well-connected financial advisor in New York City who trusts his instincts that the blackouts affecting the city might be part of something bigger. He leaves the city with his daughter Ruth, and they head to their vacation home. There, they’re met with a stubborn Amanda who wants them gone. 

Mahershala Ali is an award-winning actor, known for his range of complex characters — from dramas like True Detective and Moonlight to family fun animation like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. That ability to juggle tone and genres is exactly what drew Esmail to Ali for the role of G.H. “Mahershala’s poignant everyman quality mixed with his undeniable charisma make it nearly impossible for him to deliver a substandard performance,” Esmail told Netflix. “That was what G.H. needed, a deep-hearted accessibility that lets him be your avatar into the story.”

For Ali, the role offered that most exciting acting opportunity: a challenge. “I think what attracted me to this character was that I wasn't sure if I could do it,” Ali told Netflix. “There were things about his life — being in finance, working with the 1 percent of the 1 percent — however much success I've had or however long I’ve been around people who've had a lot of success, that's something that's still difficult for me to relate to. So if anything, I was excited about the challenge of bringing this character to life and finishing up each day feeling like I believed myself.”

House of Cards, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Swan Song, Ramy, True Detective, Hidden Figures, Moonlight

Clay Sandford is Amanda’s husband, a media studies professor who’s comfortable being the easygoing counterpart to his more strong-willed wife. But when the power goes out, Clay is completely helpless, struggling to problem-solve through a crisis. 

Four-time Academy Award nominee Ethan Hawke is an actor, director, author, and father to Stranger Things star Maya Hawke. In his portrayal of Clay, Esmail saw “one of the more fascinating characters in this film.” 

“Clay as a character is so interesting because he upends everything you’d expect from the patriarch of the family. He’s the guy that’s usually portrayed as the sturdy, flawless hero of the story. And he isn’t,” Esmail told Netflix. “What Ethan did with him is so difficult to pull off because he took a character that disappoints himself and his family in small and big ways throughout the story — but instead of begrudging him for it, you instantly relate to him that much more because of it. That’s a magic trick that’s not only hard to pull off, but it’s just something I’ve never quite seen rendered on screen in such a pure and vulnerable way,” he added.

“I think the most interesting aspect about Clay is how much I don’t enjoy playing him!” Hawke said. “I’ve spent much of my life trying not to be Clay. The characters in this film are dealing with the ramifications of their own personal blind spots as individuals and as a society, and Clay represents that in its most egregious form: somebody who means well and does nothing. That could be said for so many of us, and in a lot of ways, you don’t want to be too judgmental of Clay because you can very quickly become judgmental of yourself. “

Dead Poets Society, Boyhood, Training Day, First Reformed, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Black Phone, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight

Ruth is G.H.’s 25-year-old daughter who has no problem calling out her elders, whether it’s for her own father’s evasiveness or Amanda’s shortsightedness. 

Myha’la is a promising young actor who’s been cast in a range of roles, from the romance anthology Modern Love to the drama of Industry and the horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies. “She’s amazing,” Esmail told Netflix about working with the actor. “Ruth is written as this really sort of brazen, overly confident person, but then there are quiet moments where her fears get the best of her. Myha’la has the range to effortlessly move from one extreme to the other, sometimes from scene to scene, sometimes from word to word.”

In Alam’s book, Ruth is G.H.’s wife, not his daughter; both the author and Esmail agreed the change would add a necessary millennial perspective to the film’s characters. “I thought changing Ruth from the wife to the daughter was a clever move on Sam Esmail’s part,” Myha’la said. “Her generation interacts with technology and media in a different way from everyone else in the film. So she becomes this interesting intersection of wealth, race, gender, age, and as a result, she can feel a bit like a contradiction. She’s young and woke, but she still judges people for their background. She’s a minority in every sense of the word, except for the fact that she grew up with money and opportunities.”

Industry, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Black Mirror, Premature, Dumb Money

Rose Sandford is Amanda and Clay’s younger child, whose binge watch of Friends is interrupted by a mysterious blackout. 

Mackenzie’s portrayal of Rose really brought a mysterious and fascinating quality to the character, Esmail told Netflix. “She has this otherworldly quality just in her eyes,” he said. “That was one of the things that really drew me to her audition. I found myself always wondering what she was thinking.”

“Rose kind of lives in her own world,” Mackenzie said. “She's curious and inquisitive and she's kind of the first one to realize or see the beginning of these strange happenings going on. She wants to know more about what's happening and nobody is telling her anything. I think Rose feels alone a lot of the time and that's why she feels like she can escape into this whole other world of television.”

United States of Al, Utopia, Logan Lucky

Archie Sandford is Amanda and Clay’s teenage son. He prefers to keep to himself and remain in his bubble of video games, often seen with his headphones on. When they all lose signal, Archie can’t help obsessing over how to stay connected to the world through his phone. 

“I think that Archie doesn’t know how to relate. He’s got his headphones on, he’s playing his video games, he’s on his phone — that’s how he knows how to exist,” Esmail said of the character. Though the character of Archie was originally written as more of a jock, Esmail said that after watching actor Charlie Evans’ audition tape, something else clicked for him. “Charlie played Archie as a smart-aleck type of guy who kind of talks from a place of know-it-all superiority versus being a run-of-the-mill callow brute,” he said. “What struck me the most is how different his Archie was from what I imagined —  and how much better it was for it.”

Evans and Esmail bonded over their shared love of movies. “I love thrillers and psychological thrillers. Movies like 2001 and all of Hitchcock’s films, and I know those are both massive inspirations for Sam,” Evans said. “I know he was really inspired by that in his youth, and he carries that through a lot of his stuff. He has this encyclopedic knowledge about films in this genre.”

The Park, Everything’s Gonna Be Okay

Danny is a local builder who worked on G.H.’s house. He’s also a survivalist who’s better equipped than the Sandfords to deal with a potential crisis. 

Bacon is known for his iconiccharacter roles in many films, from Footloose to Hollow Man. So he and Esmail worked hard to anchor Danny into this story about survival and family. “Kevin turned what could have been a clichéd stereotype of a gun-toting conspiracy theorist into a staunch family man who wanted to protect his loved ones at any cost,” Esmail said. “It’s always a daunting task when you’re playing with archetypes, but Kevin knew exactly how far to push and pull back, making Danny come to life with much more dimensionality than I could have ever written on the page.”

Footloose, City on a Hill, They/Them, The Woodsman, Mystic River, Hollow Man, Tremors, Apollo 13