Sam Esmail on the terror of “Leave the World Behind” and casting Julia Roberts as deeply unlikeable

“I knew that I needed the power of Julia Roberts to channel the humanity out of [Amanda],” the writer-director says of his leading lady.

As he was crafting his apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind, writer and director Sam Esmail found himself second-guessing his own life choices.

After all, the film, which follows two unfamiliar families thrust together after a cyberattack brings about the end of the world as they know it, offers a stark warning about our overreliance on technology — something the Mr. Robot alum is equally guilty of.

“I've grown up obsessed with technology, so I'm so reliant on it. I feel like a useless man without my technology,” Esmail tells EW with a laugh. There was also arguably some second-guessing when it came to Esmail’s decision to make the film itself, which is based on Rumaan Alam’s 2020 bestselling novel of the same name. Esmail says he’s “always hesitant” when it comes to crafting adaptations.

“There really had to be a compelling reason why you should translate it into another medium, because if it's so successful in its medium, why mess with it?” Esmail explains. It was during his second read-through of the book that he “suddenly saw a different iteration of the story.” “I saw, obviously, my obsessions with technology and grafting the cyber attack elements onto the disaster elements, and that was the first opening into what this movie would be,” he says.

From there, he knew he wanted a more panoramic view of the characters, which includes vacationing Brooklyn couple Amanda (Julia Roberts) and Clay Sandford (Ethan Hawke) and their children Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and Archie (Charlie Evans), as well as GH (Mahershala Ali) and Ruth Scott (Myha’la), who show up claiming to be the owners of the Airbnb the Sandfords are using. Esmail changed GH and Ruth — an older couple in the book — into a more fleshed-out father and daughter in the film, who may be more informed about the disaster unfolding around them than they at first appear.

“It just became a different interpretation of what Rumaan wrote, just recontextualized into the cinematic form. I'm not a fan of making a carbon copy of the book,” he says of the changes, adding, “What I wanted was to create this standalone piece so that you could read the book and you could watch the movie and one wouldn't spoil the other — that there were sort of two separate pieces and two different interpretations of the same story.”

As a writer himself, Esmail says he gives a lot of credit to Alam for not being too “sacred and precious” with the additions. “To Rumaan's credit, he completely trusted me and I outlined some of the changes I would make and he said, ‘Go forth.’ Obviously, I know that some authors want filmmakers to be very faithful, and they have every right to ask for that. And if Rumaan wanted that, he would've told me,” Esmail says, but, he adds with a grin, “I probably wouldn't have made the movie.”

Luckily, Esmail’s frequent collaborators and fellow Mr. Robot creatives — including cinematographer Tod Campbell, production designer Anastasia White, and composer Mac Quayle — agreed with his vision, too. “We complete each other's sentences at this point. We have the same obsessions with how to tell stories, and that wasn't even a question in my mind that I would reteam with them on this film,” he says.

Another no-brainer for Esmail was casting his Homecoming and Gaslit star Roberts as his leading lady here. He recalls sending her the book immediately after he first read it. “I obviously pictured Julia as this character. Amanda was a very flawed character and hard to like, and I knew that I needed the power of Julia Roberts to channel the humanity out of her. So I sent it to her, and she read it in a day, and called me the next day, and said, ‘I'm in.’”

So, armed with a stellar cast, a familiar crew, and Alam’s blessing, Esmail set forth on bringing Leave the World Behind to the big and small screens (the film is getting a limited theatrical release on Nov. 22 and hits Netflix on Dec. 8). The result is a film that touches on a lot of the same introspective themes as the book, but is somehow much more terrifying to behold — which Esmail has a theory about.

“When I expanded the disaster elements in the sort of cyber attack context, I think that exposed that notion to the audience of what a cyber attack might look like,” he says. “Because cyber attacks in general are a little obtuse and mysterious in their own right. I think people don't quite grasp what that means or what that would look like. And when you start dramatizing that on screen and they start realizing that that's a real connection to reality, I think that's where the real terror might hit.”

And, ultimately, he hopes that terror provokes conversation. Says Esmail, “For me, this was a conversation starter. It's to really get inside your mind and unlock the fears that you might really have about our world, and to be moved by that enough to talk to someone about it.”

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