ZEROZEROZERO

The bottom line on Sky’s new global drugs drama.

Adapted from Roberto Saviano’s 2013 crime book, ZeroZeroZero arrives with its underworld credibility firmly intact. Saviano is the author of Gomorrah, the acclaimed true-life account of the Camorra crime syndicate in Naples. Meanwhile, series co-creator Stefano Sollima, who directs two of the eight episodes here, also directed the Sicario sequel, Day Of The Soldado.

With its title referring to a nickname for cocaine at its purest, ZeroZeroZero is an international drugs drama that forges links between a Mexican cartel and an Italian crime syndicate known as ’Ndrangheta. In between is a New Orleans shipping family – run by Gabriel Byrne’s patriarch Edward Lynwood – using their legitimate infrastructure to smuggle vast quantities of cocaine from Latin America to Europe.

“What drew me most in Roberto’s book was not so much the idea of cocaine as a phenomenon, but as a good being traded, transported,” says Sollima, when Small Screen meets with him in Venice. “And how the huge profits, huge earnings made through cocaine trafficking have a strong impact on the economies and social fabrics of all of the countries involved.”

It’s a theme that piqued the interest of British actor Andrea Riseborough,

who plays Lynwood’s more-thancapable daughter Emma. “There’s a lot of suffering along that [supply] chain,” she says. “It’s surprisingly easy for people to go and have a night out and kick back and take recreational drugs… but it’s difficult to then trace back to who has suffered for it, and who has benefitted from it.”

While Emma is being groomed to take over the family business (“She behaves in a man’s world as a man,” says Riseborough), her brother, Chris (Dane DeHaan), has Huntington’s and has begun to show signs of the usually fatal disease. “He wants to be involved in the family business, he’s just not allowed to be, because his father treats him like this fragile bird,” says DeHaan. “I don’t think he sees himself as fragile.”

The actor, who previously co-starred with Byrne in HBO drama In Treatment, adds that Chris doesn’t stay on the sidelines. “I would say Chris, of all the characters in the show, has the biggest arc. He goes through a lot of extreme things. He kind of gets thrown into the thick of it. It gets really crazy and really exciting.”

With the Lynwoods caught in an escalating war for power and money, excitement is something Sollima knows exactly how to provide. From a kinetic, tone-setting restaurant shoot-out early on, ZeroZeroZero is designed to get the pulse racing. But even in the grimmest of scenes – one poor sod gets fed to some ravenous pigs – the director is careful not to turn our stomachs too much: “It would’ve been just [too] graphic.”

Rather, he’s more concerned with delivering an expansive storyline, one that even shot in Senegal and Morocco. But what of the show? Could it follow Gomorrah and head for a second season? “Not with the same characters,” he nods, “but a journey would always be at the core – another shipment, maybe even in another time period.”

ZEROZEROZERO BEGINS ON SKY ATLANTIC AND NOW TV LATER IN THE YEAR.