Partly filmed in Worcester, Netflix releases 'Don’t Look Up' Thursday, will stream Christmas Eve

In Netflix’ “Don’t Look Up” — being released in select theaters Thursday night and streaming on Netflix Christmas Eve — it’s the end of the world as we know it and, in two scenes, the city of Worcester looks fine.

“Don’t Look Up” is the latest from Academy Award-winner scriptwriter and Academy Award-nominated director Andy McKay, who grew up in Worcester.

The movie stars three-time Oscar-winner Meryl Streep, two-time Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett, Oscar-winners Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Mark Rylance and Oscar-nominee Jonah Hill, for starters.

DiCaprio and Lawrence play a low-level professor of astronomy and Michigan State astronomy grad student, respectively, who discover a meteor on a collision course with Earth. They try to warn Meryl Streep, who plays President of the United States Janie Orlean, and her sniveling Secretary of State (and son) Jonah Hill, who spends most of his time in the oval office belittling the astronomers and carrying his mother’s expensive designer purse.

In turn, the president shrugs off the warning and spreads “fake news” to her rabid fan base about the severity of the impending impact.

Sound familiar?

Initially inspired by David Wallace-Wells’ 2019 book “The Uninhabitable Earth” (which depicts the ways in which global warming will wreak havoc on the planet if nothing is done to combat the climate crisis), McKay said the first few drafts of “Don’t Look Up” weren’t comedic at all. He first played the story as a straight drama but came to the realization that he needed it to make it a comedy because, as he puts, after these last few years, we really, really needed to laugh.

Movie actually about climate crisis

And while many will see this movie as a biting social commentary on the country’s serious divide on whether scientific findings on the coronavirus are harshly accurate or just unnecessarily alarmist (and made up for political gain), McKay — who grew up in Worcester — insists “Don’t Look Up” wasn’t intentionally about the coronavirus pandemic in the first place.

“I wrote it before COVID. It actually was more about the climate crisis,” McKay said during a phone interview Friday with the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. “We were scouting in Boston the movie when COVID hit. So what was so strange about the movie was then seeing a lot of the movie come true right in front of me because we, obviously, had to shut down.”

Filming in Worcester

On Friday, Dec. 4, 2020, in the height of the pandemic outbreak, two scenes were shot in Worcester for the Netflix movie “Don’t Look Up.”

At daybreak, movie equipment was carted into the courtyard of Mercantile Center.

The Mercantile Center courtyard scene involves Rob Morgan’s character Dr. Oglethorpe (who, with DiCaprio and Lawrence’s characters, are trying to tell the world that Armageddon is just six months away) who is being taken in custody by a bunch of gun-toting FBI agents.

Although the scene (which happens around the 49-minute mark) is quick, you can recognize Union Station off in the horizon to the left, and several Front Street properties to the right including 145 Front at City Square and AC Hotel by Marriott Worcester.

The other scene was filmed inside the DCU Center.

Happening roughly around the hour-and-40-minute mark, the scene features Streep as the science-naysaying President of the United States on the DCU Center stage with Hill, her sniveling Secretary of State (and son) Jonah Hill, rallying her supporters to take a blind eye towards science and deny the existence of a comet on a collision course with Earth by merely not looking up at the sky.

“Do you know why they want you to look?” Streep asks her followers in the scene. “Because they want you to be afraid…They think they’re better than us.”

Also in the scene, Streep struts onstage. points to the crowd and dons a “Don’t Look Up" hat with an illustration of an arrow pointing down at the ground. Coincidently, roughly five years earlier (on Nov. 18, 2015), Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump conducted a campaign rally in the very same spot that Streep mocks the POTUS in “Don’t Look Up.”

“It was Meryl Streep’s first scene in the movie. She got to play like she’s talking to 12,000 people but it’s the peak of the pandemic so we were only able to have a dozen, spread out people,” McKay said. “And I, of course, improvise a lot, so I started throwing these ideas at her. It’s her very first day on set and, of course, she’s like, ‘Oh my god. I was terrible.’ And she’s incredible because she’s Meryl Streep. Jonah was there, improvising up a storm. It was a blast.”

As far as the potential of alienating half his audience even before they see it because of the movie's subject matter, McKay said he thinks “Don’t Look Up” does a pretty good job of lampooning all elements of 21st Century culture.

"Clearly, (the upbeat morning show) ‘The Daily Rip’ wouldn’t be on FOX. It would be on MSNBC or CNN. I feel like we make fun of text billionaires. We even make fun of Hollywood. So, yeah, we make fun of the right wing as well. But, it’s really, kind of, talking about how our whole society, right, left, center, has all been turned upside down by big money, big tech, clicks, careerism, narcissism, bright colors, the kind of slot-machine edification of American culture,” McKay said. “There are always people who complain about movies, especially with comedies. There is always going to be a chunk of people that don’t like them so I’m prepared for that. But, hopefully, a majority of the people will dig it, connect with it and, most of all, can relate to it.”

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Partly filmed in Worcester, Netflix’ releases 'Don’t Look Up' Thursday, will stream Christmas Eve