Since President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama left the White House in 2017, the couple have gotten into business in Hollywood by producing a number of projects in recent years. The couple’s next executive producing effort is Leave The World Behind. The movie coming out this December stars Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali, and is helmed by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail. The director recently spoke about notes Obama gave during production, and the former U.S. president’s perspective on the movie’s topic sounds riveting.
Leave The World Behind is among the many upcoming book adaptations to look forward to this fall. Based on Rumaan Alam’s novel of the same name, it’s a psychological thriller about two families that are strangers to one another that become entangled in an apocalyptic event in the same luxurious home. While speaking to Vanity Fair, Sam Esmail recalled the notes he received from President Barack Obama.
In the original drafts of the script, I definitely pushed things a lot farther than they were in the film, and President Obama, having the experience he does have, was able to ground me a little bit on how things might unfold in reality. I am writing what I think is fiction, for the most part, I’m trying to keep it as true to life as possible, but I’m exaggerating and dramatizing. And to hear an ex-president say you’re off by a few details…I thought I was off by a lot! The fact that he said that scared the fuck out of me.
Obama was such a fan of Alam’s 2020 novel that he placed the book on one of his famed summer reading lists prior to becoming the producer on the film adaptation. While Obama didn’t deal with the kind of state of emergency that occurs in the book, he certainly has a lengthy resume on crisis management and brought that to the producing effort through his and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions company. Esmail continued with these words:
He had a lot of notes about the characters and the empathy we would have for them. I have to say he is a big movie lover, and he wasn’t just giving notes about things that were from his background. He was giving notes as a fan of the book, and he wanted to see a really good film.
More specifically, Leave The World Behind follows Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as a wealthy couple who drive out a remote luxury Airbnb in Long Island for a vacation away from their home in Brooklyn alongside their teen children. However, their idyllic time away is disrupted when an older Black couple show up one night identifying themselves as the home’s owners who have fled a blackout in the city to take shelter. The unique situation tests both parties' trust in the other.
Could Leave The World Behind become the latest in great Julia Roberts movies? We’ll find out once the movie finds its first audiences. The family drama is first set to find its world premiere at AFI Fest on October 25 before it joins 2023 Netflix movie release dates on December 8. The Obamas are also the executive producers behind an upcoming biopic about gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, Rustin, which is heading to select theaters on November 3 before reaching Netflix subscribers on November 17.
