Jude Law Was Warned By Contagion Advisors That A Pandemic Was Inevitable
Jude Law explains in a recent video that the scientific advisers on Contagion knew that a pandemic is inevitable. The newest face of Dumbledore is referring to the 2011 film that imagines how the world would react to a deadly virus, from the perspective of both ordinary citizens and government officials from the WHO and U.S. CDC. The socio-political thriller was directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Scott Burns, and featured an all-star cast including Law, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kate Winslet.
Contagion quickly shot to the top of streaming charts at the beginning of the year in response to the coronavirus outbreak. While some prefer to watch movies that provide distraction from the outside world, others choose to watch relevant movies in order to cope—and Contagion is probably the most relevant movie to our experience with COVID today. Contagion was riddled with eerily accurate predictions of how the outbreak of a deadly virus would play out, both in terms of how a virus could manifest and spread, and how citizens and governments would react. Specifically, the film was able to predict the dangerously rapid spread of misinformation and some people's distrust of the certified experts.
Of course, that does not and should not stop experts from weighing in – as they apparently did back in 2011 to provide scientific information during the conception of Contagion. In a recent GQ video featuring the actor dissecting his most important roles, Law said that he spoke with many scientific advisors as research for playing the movie's resident conspiracy theorist Alan Krumwiede. According to Law, the experts all said that a pandemic would be inevitable. You can read Law's account below:
"There was absolutely the sense that this was going to happen. The great scientists on set with us... were very learned and experienced individuals who knew what to expect and they all said to us that this was all going to happen and it was a case of 'when' rather than 'if.'
What is scary is that you learn on a set on a film like that because you're being advised by experts – but it doesn't necessarily sit. I mean that was 10 years ago let's say, maybe nine. So I'd say that maybe sat in my system, scared the hell out of me for all of 18 months, and after that I don't know that I was that aware of it as I probably was when I came off the back of it. But when 2020 started and we heard about what was initially happening in China and what fast became apparent around the world, it rang alarm bells. Unfortunately I wasn't hugely surprised. Scott and Steven had done a huge amount of research and sent me all sorts of links to different characters online who were gathering and building followings of their sort of rants and predictions. And the characters that they were sending me to look at actually... they were far fetched but they were real... and so Krumwiede's a kind of collection of all of those. What's extraordinary maybe more than in the way the virus spreading is how characters like that have really started to pop up, as over the last nine years our reliance on tweets and blogs and the voices out there have become more and more heard."
Law also mentions that he was considerably fearful of a possible pandemic when he finished filming Contagion, but that anxiety managed to subside as he moved on to different projects. That said, he never completely forgot the information he learned on set and was therefore not surprised when he heard of the coronavirus when it first started to spread across the globe.
Contagion may have been created almost a decade ago, but the movie's relevance makes it seem as if it were made yesterday in response to the COVID pandemic. Even Jude Law's other speculative film Gattaca was able to posit relevant questions about genetic engineering long before that technology seemed to be a possibility. It goes to show that films can reflect people's collective anxiety and they can sometimes make reasonable predictions based on human behavior.
Source: GQ
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