Gwyneth Paltrow
Gwyneth Paltrow is an Academy Award- and Golden Globe Award-winning actress, who is perhaps now best known for her successful lifestyle brand and website, Goop. The daughter of actress Blythe Danner and director Bruce Paltrow, Paltrow made her debut in the film Shout in 1991. Other films include Se7en, Emma, Great Expectations, Sliding Doors, Shakespeare in Love (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress), The Talented Mr. Ripley, Shallow Hal, The Royal Tenenbaums, Proof, Iron Man, and The Avengers.
Matt Damon
One of three members of the Contagion cast to have also starred in the big-screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, Damon viewed Mitch as the most relatable character in the film because he was not a scientist or a government official. Damon's other films include Good Will Hunting, the Bourne films, The Martian, the Ocean films, The Departed, Saving Private Ryan, We Bought a Zoo, Downsizing, Invictus, and Behind the Candelabra.
Laurence Fishburne
Laurence Fishburne is an American actor, perhaps best known for his work in The Matrix trilogy. His other films include Boyz n the Hood, Apocalypse Now, the John Wick films, What's Love Got to Do With It, Othello, The Color Purple, King of New York, Mystic River, Man of Steel, and as Dr. Raymond Langston on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
Jude Law
Jude Law is an English actor of stage and screen. His films include The Talented Mr. Ripley (for which he won a BAFTA Award), Enemy at the Gates, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Road to Perdition, Cold Mountain, Closer, The Holiday, Sherlock Holmes, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwalf, Hugo, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and more recently the television series The Young Pope and The New Pope.
Kate Winslet
Kate Winslet made her name as a British actress with performances in period dramas, most notably Sense and Sensibility, for which she won a BAFTA Award for the role of Marianne Dashwood. She made her name as a global star when James Cameron cast her in his blockbuster Academy Award-winning epic Titanic, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. Afterward, she preferred roles in smaller, less commercial films such as Quills and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. For her work in The Reader, adapted from the novel of the same name by Bernard Schlink, she won both the Oscar and the BAFTA in the Best Actress category. Other Kate Winslet films include Heavenly Creatures, Holy Smoke!, Hideous Kinky, Revolutionary Road, Little Children, Finding Neverland, and A Little Chaos.
Winslet consulted with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when preparing herself to play the role of Mears, and felt that she was able to understand the constant feeling of being under threat, and the extreme stress, that those who work with pandemics are under every day. She also decided that Mears was the conduit between science and the layperson, rather than as strictly "one of the scientists."
Jennifer Ehle
Sodrbergh always had Ehle in mind for the role of Ally Hextall, having known her for some while and admiring her work in the Liam Neeson film Michael Clayton. Before officially casting her, Soderbergh watched the entire series of British wartime drama The Camomile Lawn, in which she had starred as the feisty and bold Calypso, a character Soderbergh felt was very similar to that of Ally Hextall. Ehle is perhaps best known for her portrayal of Elizabeth Bennett in the PBS miniseries of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Her other films include Wilde, The King's Speech, Zero Dark Thirty, and A Little Chaos.
Marion Cotillard
Marion Cotillard is a French actress who has won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a British Academy Film Award, and two César Awards. Her films include The Story of a Boy Who Wanted to Be Kissed, A Very Long Engagement, La Vie en Rose (for which she won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and a César), Nine, Two Days, One Night, Public Enemies, Inception, Macbeth, Minions, Pretty Things, and Little White Lies.
