The cast of “Last Light” wants you to be scared. They also want you to do something.
The apocalyptic world of the Peacock limited series, which premiered Thursday and is based on Alex Scarrow’s bestselling novel, is caused not by a nuclear explosion or a global pandemic but something far simpler and likely: the oil supply has vanished. Within days, chaos has overtaken the world, partnered with fear and evil and selfishness.
Oil means gas for cars and electricity for lights and ovens. When it goes, everything goes.
“All these issues — climate change, our dependency on oil, what that is doing to the climate and our economy — it does have an effect on the minutiae of people’s lives, not just the big picture of the world we live in but every single person,” Joanna Froggatt, the “Downton Abbey” alum who stars as Elena Yeats, a mother of two awaiting surgery for her blind son when the lights go out, told the Daily News.
“Rather than one big event, it’s an accumulation of what we’re doing and what we’ve done before.”
At the center of the crisis is Elena’s husband, Andy, a petrochemist tasked with figuring out what is happening and why.
Matthew Fox, making his return to TV after more than a decade off the air since “Lost,” the popular ABC show about a group of castaways, wrapped, was drawn to the intentional blurring of the lines between good and evil. Who is worse: the Saudi oil tycoons or the climate change activists?
“Who are the good guys and bad guys in this story?” the 56-year-old actor told The News. “And all the gray areas in between.”
Showrunner Dennie Gordon hadn’t intended to make a show so timely, as oil prices skyrocketed over the summer, but that’s the unfortunate reality of writing about climate change, she said: it’s never not timely.
“One little thing can cascade into the next and before you know it, that small little event becomes catastrophic. We think all of our resources are endless,” she told The News.
“This is just around the corner and we know from COVID how bad it can get, and from Katrina. No one’s coming to save us.”
The only way to get that through to people, she said, is to scare them. “Last Light” should be scary.
“[People] lose their sense of reality very quickly. In the show, we see that escalating very quickly from one episode to the next,” said Amber Rose Revah, who plays Mika Bakhash, a British government employee working on energy compliance.
“Oil and the dependency we all have on fossil fuels is a definite factor in a thing that could potentially, very quickly cause a domino effect into chaos.”
During Brexit, Revah remembered, she watched people drive from station to station looking for petrol. But that only lasted a week; a “slight hiccup,” she called it. What if it lasts longer than that next time?
“It’s not just for everyone else. It’s for us – you, me, everyone – to do their part,” the 36-year-old “Punisher” actress said.
“There’s no denying how important it is. It’s our world. It’s our species.”
Most people, by now, have realized that climate change is a problem, the cast contended, but the answers typically presented are small: cut down on the hairspray, buy an electric car. The oil and coal companies haven’t been pushed to find their own solutions.
“There’s a line in the show that’s something to do with when the world stops making X amount of money on oil, that’s when things will change,” Froggatt, 42, told The News.
“We all have personal responsibility but there is a greater responsibility that governments and big corporations have to take as well.”
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