Why Sam Esmail Cast America’s Sweetheart Julia Roberts as a “Karen”

Sam Esmail is baffled by the desire for adaptations to be faithful to their source material. “That’s not the point,” says the man who brought us Mr. Robot and Homecoming. “The point is, you’re making a great film, and if you’re handcuffing yourself to the source material, you’re going to get into a lot of trouble.”

With Leave the World Behind, Esmail says he was eager to adapt Rumaan Alam’s examination of class and race relations because he knew he could tell a different version of the story for film. He immediately enlisted frequent collaborator Julia Roberts, who stars opposite Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali in what is, spoilers aside, a tale of two families as they fight for survival amid an inexplicable blackout. Netflix jumped aboard the apocalyptic thriller and will drop it on the service Dec. 8 after a brief run in theaters. Then, former President Obama, who used to request episodes of Mr. Robot at the White House before they aired, signed on as an executive producer via his Higher Ground Productions. 

Seated in his Esmail Corp. headquarters in L.A., where New York-based Esmail comes through when work demands it, he opens up about his disapproving parents, his preemptively pulled passion project, and the calming energy wife Emmy Rossum and their two young children provide. 

I’ve heard you say that prep is your favorite part of the filmmaking process and that you dread actual production. Has that changed?

Absolutely not. (Laughs.) I’ll say it this way, I am not as good of a filmmaker as Steven Spielberg is. And who is, really? 

I don’t know, at 5 years old you were inspired to become a filmmaker after watching E.T., which apparently underwhelmed you. 

That was my 5-year-old asshole self. I would not say that now! I mean, he’s one of the greats. He can walk onto a set with no storyboard and no shot list and figure out how he’s going to shoot the scene. I’m nowhere near that good. So, for me, prep is incredibly important. You get to see the perfect version of the movie in your head, and then invariably reality comes knocking when you’re in production and things just fall apart. But then you’re in post, and you get to reimagine …

Well, you’re in control again.

Yes, and that’s the big thing for me. I’m not the type of director that tries to get coverage and then figures it out in post. I really try to be deliberate with all our choices. When life interferes, it throws a monkey wrench into that. And that’s part of the reason why I like to shoot on soundstages — I don’t have to worry about things like weather. When we found the house [for Leave the World Behind], I turned to my production designer and said, “Great, now build that on the soundstage.” So, yeah, control is a priority.

When things inevitably do go awry, how do you, as the leader, cope? 

I go on my phone and text Emmy about the kids just to take me out of it. It resets my mind.

The worlds you’ve chosen to dramatize are particularly intense. How do they weigh on you and perhaps even your family? 

Honestly, I don’t feel like what I do is nihilistic. I know people watch my stuff and think, “Oh, he’s got to be this dark, brooding guy.” But in a world that has darkness in it, I try to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Like, I’m not here to say that the world is going to burn to a crisp. I’m actually trying to say the opposite. What art can do, if it’s successful, is help us work through trauma and cope with what’s going on in the world. 

So, Mr. Robot comes out and is an instant success. How do your incoming calls change?

First, let me just say, I didn’t have incoming calls before Mr. Robot. So, the phone actually rang, and yes, it’s everything you’d assume. I started getting all these stories and books and graphic novels about twisty thrillers and dark, brooding antiheroes, which was a shock to me because as much as those elements are in Mr. Robot, it wasn’t how I ever saw myself as a filmmaker. But after Mr. Robot, I was the dark thriller guy.

Are you ever tempted to just make, like, a bright, sunny musical?

Weirdly, growing up, I was a huge fan of romantic comedies, which are the sunniest and brightest. Comet [his 2014 feature directorial debut, starring Rossum] was my attempt at a romantic comedy, which, of course, was not bright and sunny at all. I’m drawn to seeing people work through problems versus seeing people not have any, because that’s not relatable to me. One of my favorite romantic comedies is My Best Friend’s Wedding — which I was a big fan of way before I knew Julia — because she doesn’t end up with the guy at the end, and that feels truer to life.

I’m going to guess people aren’t bringing you too many rom-coms. 

No. But put it out there, please, because I would love to do one! 

You were hands-on in almost every aspect of Mr. Robot. From the outside, at least, it appears you’ve gotten better at delegating, producing shows like Gaslit, Briarpatch and The Resort without running them. What changed?

If I were to dip my toe, then I’d want the whole thing. That’s part of the reason why I ended up directing all the episodes of Mr. Robot. I was too committed to that story to relinquish anything. So, when we do find a project like Gaslit and Robbie Pickering and Amelia Gray, who were in my Mr. Robot room, it was their show. And then Matt Ross came in to direct all the episodes, and it was his production. And for me, that’s easy because now I’m a fan, I’m the audience member, and I get to guide the process from that perspective rather than being on the other side. It’s really one or the other for me.

You’ve been open about your first-generation American upbringing, which often had you feeling like an outsider. How did it inform you as a storyteller? 

I felt very alienated being raised a Muslim and Arab, especially in the South in the ’80s. I mean, I was pretty much on my own trying to fit in and being envious of American culture because my parents were not a part of that at all. They resisted that. I’d watch movies and TV shows and have this weird nostalgia for that life. And what’s interesting about that is realizing later that “Oh, it wasn’t like that for white America, either.” 

Do you still feel like an outsider?

Oh yeah. I remember thinking after Mr. Robot, “Oh, am I in the club now?” I don’t feel that way anymore. I still feel like I’m on the outskirts, looking over the gates. 

What’s inside?

The master filmmakers. They’re all having tea and talking about F-stops and lighting, and I’d bring them coffee if they wanted me to. But that might just be my mentality from how I grew up and in many ways my comfort zone.

Your parents tried to talk you out of this line of work, did they not?

They’d bristle every time it came up. And I was literally writing scripts in my notebook as a kid and then playing them out with my figurines, timing it to make sure it was feature length. Then I got a camera and started shooting with my friends and my brother. Around sixth or seventh grade, we were at a parent-teacher conference, and my parents asked my teacher, “Is he ever going to grow out of this?” Of course, being immigrant parents, they wanted me to go down a stable career path: a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. That’s part of the reason why they came here. My teacher looked at me and asked, “How serious are you about being a filmmaker?” I said, “100 percent serious.” Then she turned back to them and said, “I bet you he’s going to grow out of it.” And that just lit a fire under my ass. I was so angry, I thought, “I’ll prove it to you.” 

Did they ultimately come around?

My dad passed away before any of this happened. My mom doesn’t really watch [my stuff]. I mean, she tried, I think, and kind of gave up on it. Look, my parents never really watched American films or TV. If it wasn’t in Arabic or about Egyptian culture, it wasn’t something they were interested in.

How does that sit with you? 

It’s terrible. It was funny being on the Mr. Robot awards circuit because Rami [Malek], who is similar in age to me, also has Egyptian immigrant parents. It’s almost uncanny how similar our circumstances are — we both have a sister and brother, I have two, and our dads passed away around the same time. But his mom would come with him to everything, and she watched every episode of Mr. Robot. It’s just something that I didn’t get to have, and of course I have envy. I try to have empathy and I know they just wanted me to be safe, but it overshadowed my dream.

You have Julia Roberts, however, who seems to have become a muse of yours. I’m curious about the decision to cast America’s sweetheart as what is effectively a Karen in Leave the World Behind. 

But it’s for that reason. Amanda’s a very flawed character in the book, but I found her compelling, and I knew making it into a film, the audience needs to find some way to access this person and it was going to be hard. You really need someone like Julia Roberts. She’s not only America’s sweetheart, but she’s like the Michael Jordan of actors, and she was going to find a way to channel the humanity out of this person. 

What made you want to tell this story now? 

I’d been toying with the idea of doing a disaster film about a cyberattack. And traditionally, in a disaster film, what’s front and center are the disaster elements, and the characters tend to be secondary. But when I read this book, because the characters are so beautifully drawn and the infighting has this subtext of classism and racism, I realized there was an opportunity here to invert that process and make the characters front and center and push the disaster elements off in the distance. And actually, that felt weirdly more true to life. I read the book in the early days of the pandemic, and I remember the friction and division [COVID] caused because of the not knowing. That’s what excited me, and it’s why I said, “OK, wait a minute, this is the disaster film I’ve been looking to write.”

Higher Ground came aboard as producers on the film. What does a note from Barack Obama look like?

We were all really focused on making this a cautionary tale, a warning about what could happen, which was really important to everyone on the team, not just President Obama. But he really had a kind of global overview of the film. He commented on everything from character to empathy to the disaster elements to the themes. It was wild — and, honestly, a highlight of my career.

The industry is coming off a very rough six-month period. Are there still lingering tensions, or is it business as usual?

It feels different because I don’t think we’re fully back. It’s slow going and a lot of people are worried about 2024. We all read the same headlines, and shows and movies are being pushed. There’s a lot of anxiety about how that’s going to impact the business and the choices. People certainly aren’t looking for the next Game of Thrones or the next world-building show.

You were making one of those with Metropolis until Universal TV, where you’re in an overall deal, pulled the plug. What happened?

All I know is the show was really expensive. We were in Melbourne, and we literally had the biggest volume [a soundstage that includes LED panels] on the planet. We had multiple volume stages, actually. When the writers strike happened, and then the actors strike was on the horizon, it was just too costly to keep all those stages indefinitely without any end in sight. From a financial point of view, I understood the studio’s perspective. I think if the show were cheaper, we probably would’ve stood a better chance of surviving. 

Did you see it coming?

I sort of saw it coming, especially when there were grumblings about a SAG strike. I just didn’t know how we were going to be able to keep floating the production for so long.

Is there a way to reimagine it at a different price point, or is that not appealing to you?

I was very passionate and am still very passionate about the show. I think what our production designer did was beautiful. Some of the art and the designs for the sets were amazing. And our VFX supervisor, some of the concepts we were working on for the sequences were breathtaking. So, I’d be happy to reengage in a conversation even if it’s at a lower price point because I think there’s something really special about that project.

And where are you with your Battlestar Galactica adaptation? 

We have a great outline and we’re probably going to go to pilot soon.

That’s another example of a show you aren’t running. How come?

Because I know myself as a filmmaker and I don’t know if hard sci-fi is something I’m going to be the A-plus person to pull off. And Battlestar needs the cream of the crop. But I love the world and what Ron Moore did with the [2004 version] — how it was such an allegory for what we were going through at the time of 9/11. I knew that if we bring in the right partners to write and film the show, I could be on that other end as a person of guidance to say, “OK, I think this is working; it’s the same magic I felt watching the Ron Moore version.”

As the world changes, does the show’s take on it change with it? 

Yeah, and the world is changing way too fast for us. I mean, when we started working on it, I obviously was aware of AI, but now, four or five years later, it’s in the public consciousness and now that’s so influential in how we’re going to tell the story. The allegory piece is something that is crystallized in a different way, too. The focus is the same, which is the fear of tech and how it might take over, but this idea of just “the robots are going to be our overlords” is a very facile and overly simplistic way of looking at it. Now that the audience is more sophisticated about the consequences, I think we have to match that with Battlestar. 

This story first appeared in the Nov. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.