Marion Cotillard (Dr. Leonora Orantes), Matt Damon (Mitch Emhoff), Laurence Fishburne (Dr. Ellis Cheever), Jude Law (Alan Krumwiede), Gwyneth Paltrow (Beth Emhoff), Kate Winslet (Dr. Erin Mears), Bryan Cranston (RADM Lyle Haggerty), Sanaa Lathan (Aubrey Cheever), Jennifer Ehle (Dr. Ally Hextall)

Plot Outline

An international traveler reaches into the snack bowl at an airport bar before passing her credit card to a waiter. A business meeting begins with a round of handshakes. A man coughs on a crowded bus…

One contact. One instant. And a lethal virus is transmitted.

When Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns to Minneapolis from business in Hong Kong, what she thought was jet lag takes a virulent turn. Two days later, she’s dead in the ER and the doctors tell her shocked and grieving husband (Matt Damon) they have no idea why.

Soon, others exhibit the same mysterious symptoms: hacking coughs and fever, followed by seizure, brain hemorrhage…and ultimately, death. In Minneapolis, Chicago, London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong, the numbers quickly multiply: one case becomes four, then sixteen, then hundreds, thousands, as the contagion sweeps across all borders, fueled by the countless human interactions that make up the course of an average day.

A global pandemic explodes.

At the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers mobilize to break the code of a unique biological pathogen as it continues to mutate. Deputy Director Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) tries to allay the growing panic despite his own personal concerns, and must send a brave young doctor (Kate Winslet) into harm’s way. At the same time, amid a rising tide of suspicion over a potential vaccine—and who gets it first — Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) of the World Health Organization works through the network of connections that could lead back to the source of what they’re dealing with.

As the death toll escalates and people struggle to protect themselves and their loved ones in a
society breaking down, one activist blogger (Jude Law) claims the public isn’t getting the truth
about what’s really going on, and sets off an epidemic of paranoia and fear as infectious as the
virus itself.

Marion's Role

Marion Cotillard plays epidemiologist Leonora Orantes who works at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland and is the counterpart of Dr. Erin Mears. As clusters of illness appear in London, Hong Kong, Tokyo and other cities around the world, simultaneously with cases in the U.S., she works urgently to reconstruct the final days of Beth’s itinerary and connect the seemingly random dots that lead back to ground zero. And patient zero. While everything else in the movie is hurtling forward, Orantes is effectively working backwards in time to unravel the mystery of where this thing came from, which is the key to figuring out where it might strike next. Additionally, Orantes must always be aware of how events and investigations, and their potential
consequences, might play out diplomatically on the world stage. She gets dropped into
situations and has to deal with cultural as well as scientific issues that are sometimes at odds.
Perhaps because of that, Orantes is a somewhat locked-in character, very
professional but also remote and dispassionate. But something happens to her in the course of the
story that causes a significant emotional shift… something that would not have happened if not
for her pursuing the origins of this virus.

External Links

• News Updates
• Official Site
• IMDb
• Buy DVD or Blu-ray (France)
• Buy DVD or Blu-ray (US)
• Buy DVD or Blu-ray (UK)

Quotes from Marion

She starts with Beth Emhoff. Beth was the first person known to have died from the virus so Dr. Orantes tracks her itinerary. Fortunately for her, we now have video cameras everywhere so the first thing she does is study the footage from the cameras in the hotel, the elevator and the casino.” But even that can only take her so far. “You can discover a point of contact between two people, and you know both of them became ill, but it could have gone either way—the question is, which one of them infected the other? Meanwhile, Time is the enemy. As quickly as Orantes and the others work, the virus is moving even faster. People are dying and desperation is growing. When there is no more water and you need to drink, you will fight for water.