Say you’re a cocaine broker—nominally, your family runs a shipping company, but the thing that really keeps the business afloat is connecting prospective buyers of multi-ton drug shipments with eager sellers, and moving the freight from one to the other. Say one of those buyers attempts to scuttle the shipment, instructing the captain to abandon ship and leave you for dead. Say you singlehandedly manage to make it to port in Senegal. Congratulations: you’re left with the challenge of moving $60 million worth of illicit cargo through a jihadist-controlled stretch of the Sahara, and then to its destination in Italy. Bummer, right?

This is the logistical nightmare faced by Chris and Emma Lynwood, the brokers at the heart of ZeroZeroZero, the sprawling, distressingly grim eight-part epic now streaming on Amazon. Dane DeHaan, who plays Chris, currently finds himself facing a slightly less complicated—though no less serious—problem while self-isolating with his wife and young daughter in upstate New York. “Right now, we are turning our guest room in this house into a room for our baby boy that's coming in June,” he tells me over a Zoom video call that, while a little fritzy, nonetheless picks up his startling baritone. “I didn't realize that once you start taking stuff out of one room, you have to move around basically your entire house.” He takes a beat and lays the sarcasm on a little thicker: “So that's been one thing during this whole pandemic that's been a huge logistical challenge.”

He knows it’s a small thing, all considered, but that’s life under quarantine: when global problems are too intense to comprehend, you focus on the small stuff. And so, just as Chris takes progressively decisive action in the limited series—sailing with the freight; making a mad dash across the desert after his jihadist captors are detonated by drone strike; sacrificing heavily to make sure the drugs make it to their buyer—DeHaan’s been doing the same. “I've been breaking it down into something that I've started to call the TOD, which is my task of the day, because I think if I try to bite it all off in one thing, it would take me three days of no sleep.” The family’s been there over a month by the time we talk—his wife, the actress Anna Wood, was on pandemic alert early, he says.

DeHaan’s trying to keep busy, latching onto whatever bits of work he can, occasional dispatches from a career that feels a million miles away. “I've never been a very creative person in terms of wanting to create my own content, or put on a play in my backyard or that kind of thing,” he says. What does an actor do when he can’t act? He does what he can—throwing himself headlong into the photoshoot for this story, to start, spurred on by Wood. It was a nice break from routine: “When we were done, she said, ‘It's really nice to just actually have something real to do in terms of our business, and what we do, because we're all at such a standstill.’"

Dane DeHaan has come to his perch in the industry—in Williamsburg, typically; he tried LA for a few unhappy years before coming back—by focusing on that small stuff. His method is less Method than deep research: to play Chris, who suffers from Huntington’s disease, a degenerative condition, he went the books-and-interviews route. To prepare for his role as history’s worst Uber passenger on Quibi’s new told-in-chapters series The Stranger, he went deep on the power of predictive algorithms. (More on that later.)