In the early days of COVID-19 lockdown, movies and shows dealing with communicable diseases were extremely popular on streaming services and people hunkered down and attempted to understand why coronavirus required radically altering daily life in order to protect others from the deadly disease.
One of those movies was the 2011 film Contagion, which detailed an outbreak of a disease that quickly causes chaos all over the world as scientists try to grasp how to create a vaccine to limit its chaos. And one of the stars of the film says he learned from experts working on the movie just how likely a real-life disease similar to the one from the movie would unleash chaos on Earth.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Jude Law explained that scientists working to make the movie accurate told him that a similar virus had the very real possibility of spreading death the way COVID-19 has in 2020.
“There was absolutely the sense that this was going to happen,” Law said. “The great scientists on set with us who had worked with Scott [Z. Burns] the writer and [director] Steven [Soderbergh] 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.”
He continued, “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.”
Contagion‘s experts aren’t the only ones predicting the likelihood of a pandemic, of course, but it’s yet another eerie warning that went largely unheeded by the general population. Not everything in Contagion matches up with what we’ve actually experienced in 2020, but even the trailer is familiar enough to be downright unsettling. Law said that the initial warnings stayed with him after making the film, but seeing it all play out this year brought back what he learned during filming.
“When 2020 started, and we heard about what was initially happening in China, what fast became apparent around the world, it rang alarm bells,” Law said. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t hugely surprised.”
[via THR]
