My brother-in-law has one of those fancy smart refrigerators. Among its features is wireless Internet connectivity so that he and my sister can use their phones from the grocery store to look inside and see what they’re running low on. They could do the same thing with just five minutes and a pen and paper, but my brother-in-law insists on living every day like it’s Star Trek. It’s convenient, he told me the day they got the thing. But while I’m not a Luddite, I’m still wary of our rush toward the bleeding edge. What’s the hurry?
Well, actor Josh Holloway feels exactly the same way as I do. “I am born a hundred years too late,” Holloway tells me. He’s using his phone to chat over Zoom, but he’s currently hanging out in his camping trailer in the middle of nowhere.
“I grew up in the Georgia mountains on dirt roads,” he says. “Like Little House on the Prairie. Technology drives me crazy. I am not good at it. I worry about this world and people’s lack of hands-on skills. No one can teach you how to build a fire anymore, or grow food, or anything that 95 percent of our existence as human beings we’ve been doing. We’ve lost all the skills.”
I’ll admit: I don’t have those exact skills. But not only have all of us lost those skills, but we’ve made ourselves dependent on things with a microchip. Our most sensitive information is in our phones, and our most important documents—photos, records, memories—are in the cloud. What happens if it goes dark? In 2009, author William R Forstchen wrote and published One Second After, a speculative novel about the immediate aftermath of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the United States. Anything with a battery is dead. The book’s grim appeal is in how bad things get when modern society is suddenly thrust into a medieval way of life.
In 2027, movie audiences will see that all played out for themselves when One Second After hits theatres from MPI Original Films. The movie, from Scott Rogers in his feature directing debut, adapts Forstchen’s novel with Holloway in the lead role. Set in the real town of Black Mountain, North Carolina, the movie sees Holloway playing John Matherson, a former Army officer who must protect his family and his community after pulse bombs disable all technology in North America.
Esquire has the first look at One Second After, which you can see below.
In one word, Holloway says the movie is a “warning.” “It can happen,” Holloway tells me. “This is why I like the movie so much: An EMP terrorist attack over America shuts the grid. Anything with a chip is done. Burnt. Not coming back. Very quickly, things turn nasty. The supermarkets clear out, and the hospitals don’t work anymore. All the airplanes fall out of the sky. Any car before 1970 stops working.”
The post-apocalypse has been in vogue all throughout the millennium. Movies like 28 Days Later, Children of Men, and I Am Legend; shows like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us. They all shape our collective imagination of what life will be like after it all comes crashing down. But Holloway believes One Second After has something new to offer the genre while also giving audiences a good old-fashioned story about resourcefulness and community when the going gets tough.
“It’s a study about what to do,” Holloway says, “and how to survive.”
He adds, “[The main characters] have to organise this town and protect this area, put everybody on rations, gather everything we can, start growing things. Start getting people who can hunt. Because that’s the only way to keep people from turning on each other and killing everybody for each other’s things. That’s the story.”
One Second After takes place in Black Mountain, North Carolina, which is where William R Forstchen really lives. “He got this idea about what could happen if our grid shuts down. Ever since I’ve done the movie, it drives me crazy,” Holloway says. “I look every day: Where everything everyone has to do [is] on the phone to gain access to anything.”
For Holloway, reality and fiction began to blur in strange ways. The movie marks his first turn as a cinematic leading man. Two decades after starring as the hunky Sawyer on Lost and making waves last year on HBO Max’s canceled-too-soon Duster, Holloway wound up at the top of the call sheet on One Second After. Much like his character John Matherson, Holloway had to learn how to be a leader.
“I was finally given an opportunity to carry a leading role,” he says. “It had a lot of dimensions, which was really attractive to me. Because, yes, this is an action-adventure movie, but it was really about family.”
Production took place in Bulgaria, which impressed both Holloway and author William R Forstchen. “They built the town in Bulgaria. [Forstchen] had tears in his eyes. He was shocked. Like, ‘They built my town here!’ It was amazing. Their food was amazing. You’d have like sheep’s-head stew and all kinds of interesting things.”
It was also a challenge. Without giving spoilers away, Holloway’s Matherson leads his town with a few moving speeches about being an American, “and I’m saying it to Bulgarians,” the actor remembers with a laugh. “But I felt this movie is more universal, about humanity. It wasn’t about a political viewpoint or nationality. It was about survival and humanity and what we could do, and I liked that.”
Among Holloway’s costars in the movie are Mary McDonnell—who Holloway says allowed him to “totally fanboy out”—and Hannah John-Kamen, a “cool, super frickin’ badass Marvel superhero.” He also worked with Famke Janssen, who stars as Black Mountain’s mayor.
“The first two weeks bonded us tight, because it was all the emotional stuff before it all hit. So we became a family,” Holloway recalls. “We got to know each other, and especially on location, you all stay at the same hotel. You meet for dinner or something because you’re isolated from your family back home. So that helps you bond that way.”
And of course there’s Scott Rogers in his first outing as a director. He was previously a stunt coordinator on movies like John Wick: Chapter 3, Mulan, The Matrix Resurrections, and Tron: Ares. “Action is his game,” Holloway says, “but it was funny, because he had to deal with actors now. He had to deal with politics. He was like, ‘I never had to do this! All I do is action!’ It was a mountain he had to climb, and he did amazing.”
One Second After isn’t trying to scare viewers into becoming survivalists—it’s still just a movie—but Holloway says there’s worth in seeing what might, and could, happen. “What we saw with the pandemic was what happens when something really rocks our society,” he says. “Now what if the grid goes down? This is a real threat. That could happen. That’s what interested me. I was like, Wow. People should actually look at this. Not to become crazy but learn some skills. Learn how to do things that could save you in a situation.”
Editor’s Note: In our interview, Josh Holloway described his character as a Pentagon analyst, but he is actually an Army officer. We regret the error.
