UNKNOWN CALLER
Format
9:16 vertical
Genre
Crime Drama
Season
30 episodes
Location
Philadelphia / Kolkata / Phoenix / Columbus, OH
The story
UNKNOWN CALLER
LOGLINE
SYNOPSIS
GLORIA REED, 67, a retired hospital administrator, answers her landline on the second ring and takes a four-minute call from a warm, respectful man at the fraud prevention desk. She writes a routing number in her own handwriting. Ten thousand miles away, RAVI SHARMA takes off his headset and rubs his ear. By the next morning Gloria has lost sixty-one thousand dollars and spent six hours on her kitchen floor with a fractured hip — because the caller told her not to phone her son. He’d be angry with her.
MARCUS REED, 34, is a digital marketing strategist. He engineers urgency, scarcity, authority and isolation for a living. He breaks his mother’s call down on a whiteboard like a campaign, recognizes the structure — he wrote something nearly identical for a client in 2023 — and calls the number back. He does not deliver the speech about his mother. He says: “I want to talk to whoever writes your scripts. Because they’re losing you about thirty percent. And I can fix that.”
Across the season Marcus builds a fake lead-data vendor, passes an audition run by DEV MALHOTRA, the floor’s craftsman, and is welcomed aboard by ARJUN MEHTA, the most humane boss in the series and the man running the crime. In Phoenix, LENA ALVAREZ logs twenty-three scam calls a day in composition notebooks and becomes Marcus’s closest ally and moral cover. In Columbus, ROBERT and ELAINE CARTER lose two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars and keep calling the numbers back, trying to get someone to explain it. A QA analyst, PRIYA NAIR, quietly copies files to a flash drive while her boss watches through the glass and says nothing. A discarded FTC analyst, DANIEL PARK, hands Marcus the gateway map because Marcus is the first person in fourteen months who read the whole thing.
Nothing Marcus does costs him anything for twenty episodes. Then all of it costs him at once: forty dollars he keeps and doesn’t spend, a name he leaves on a list, his mother finding her own beige handset on his desk, and the sentence he finally says out loud — “How could you be so stupid.” The center reopens under a new name. Lena opens her restaurant and lets her phone ring. Marcus’s screen lights up: UNKNOWN CALLER. He answers on the first ring. “This is Marcus.”
Kolkata sequences play in Hindi and Bengali with subtitles.
Casting List
The characters.
Age: 34
MARCUS REED
Role: SERIES LEAD
Age: 67
GLORIA REED
Role: MARCUS'S MOTHER — THE ONLY PERSON WHO CANNOT BE FOOLED
Age: 26
RAVI SHARMA
Role: FLOOR AGENT, KOLKATA (HINDI / BENGALI)
Age: 44
DEV MALHOTRA
Role: FLOOR LEAD, KOLKATA — THE CRAFTSMAN (HINDI / BENGALI)
Age: 29
PRIYA NAIR
Role: QUALITY ASSURANCE ANALYST, KOLKATA
Age: 41
LENA ALVAREZ
Role: PHOENIX — THE ONE WHO FOUGHT BACK
Age: 39
DANIEL PARK
Role: EX-FTC ANALYST — THE MAN WHO DRAWS THE MAP
Age: 71
ROBERT CARTER
Role: COLUMBUS, OHIO — THE COST
Age: 68
ELAINE CARTER
Role: COLUMBUS, OHIO
Age: 40s
MELISSA CARTER
Role: THE CARTERS' DAUGHTER (VOICE-OVER)
Featured role · SERIES LEAD
MARCUS REED
CHARACTER PROFILE
Black male, 34. Digital marketing strategist, Philadelphia. Genuinely likable, genuinely funny, the guy you’d want at your table — cast for warmth, not intensity. If the audience clocks him as dangerous before Episode 14, the show fails. Eleven years engineering the exact four levers fraud runs on; he never has to learn a single new skill across thirty episodes, only remove one restriction.
The lie he tells himself: “I’m doing this so it can’t happen to anyone else.” His tell inverts mid-season — the man who muted everyone starts answering on the first ring, every time. His object: his mother’s beige corded handset, unplugged on his desk for the rest of the season. His line: “I will never take money from a real person,” and the six-second hold on his face when he doesn’t transfer forty dollars back out. His wound is not guilt. It’s pride.
Arc: from the man who let it go to voicemail to the man on the other end of the line.
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode Fourteen — "TARGETING"
Read for the role of MARCUS REED.
See The Character Script
UNKNOWN CALLER
Season One ·Episode Fourteen — "TARGETING"
EPISODE FOURTEEN
“TARGETING”
INT. MARCUS’S APARTMENT – NIGHT
The whiteboard has been turned to the wall. Marcus is done
with the whiteboard.
Two monitors now. On the left, a screen-share window: Dev’s
cursor, eight thousand miles away. On the right, software
Marcus has used every working day for eleven years.
DEV (V.O.)
What is this.
MARCUS
It’s what I actually do.
He builds. Fast. This is the first time in six episodes we
have seen him fluent.
CLOSE — filters going on, one at a time:
HOUSEHOLD SIZE: 1
LANDLINE RETAINED: YES
MORTGAGE REFINANCED, LAST 18 MONTHS: YES
OBITUARY MATCH, SAME SURNAME, LAST 90 DAYS: YES
DEV (V.O.)
What’s that last one.
MARCUS
Recently bereaved.
A silence on the line that has never been there before. Dev,
who can qualify a mark in eight seconds by ear, has never
once been able to do this.
Marcus keeps going. He is not being careful. He is enjoying
himself and he does not notice that he is.
MARCUS (CONT’D)
Now watch. I’m scrubbing it.
He types. PENNSYLVANIA — EXCLUDE. Enter.
AGE 65+ — EXCLUDE. Enter.
CLOSE — the row counter at the bottom of the screen. It
drops from 84,000 to 79,300.
He looks at that number for a moment.
In the dark strip of monitor bezel between the two screens,
narrow as a mirror: his face.
MARCUS (CONT’D)
There. Clean.
DEV (V.O.)
How many of those are good.
MARCUS
They’re all good. That’s the point.
Nothing on the line.
MARCUS (CONT’D)
Dev?
INT. ARJUN’S GLASS OFFICE – KOLKATA – DAY
Dev in the doorway. He does not sit down.
DEV
He’s not an agent.
ARJUN
No?
DEV
He’s a supplier.
CUT TO BLACK.
Episode Twenty-Five — “PHOENIX”
EPISODE TWENTY-FIVE
“PHOENIX”
INT. UNFINISHED RESTAURANT – PHOENIX – EVENING
Two weeks later. The dining room is further along — chairs
stacked, one table set up in the middle of it under a work
light.
On the table: five marbled composition notebooks and a wall
of printouts taped up behind them, dense, color-coded,
entirely analog.
Lena puts a plate down in front of Marcus. He looks at it
like a man who has not been fed by another person in a long
time.
LENA
Eat that and then tell me it’s not
a system.
He eats. He genuinely eats.
Then he gets up and goes to the wall and reads it properly.
Column by column. It takes him a while.
MARCUS
You’ve got transfer latency in
here.
LENA
The pause. Before they hand you
off.
MARCUS
You timed the pause.
LENA
Six hundred and eleven times.
Marcus turns around. And what is on his face is not strategy.
It is the specific delight of a professional meeting an
amateur who has, by sheer stubbornness, built something
better than the professional would have.
MARCUS
Lena. This is — do you know what
this is?
LENA
It’s a notebook.
MARCUS
It’s a routing map.
She almost smiles. She has been carrying these for a year and
nobody has ever said a sentence like that to her.
LENA
Nobody’s ever taken these
seriously.
MARCUS
I take them seriously.
And he does. Both things are true and they are true at the
same time, and that is the whole problem with him.
She starts stacking the notebooks to hand over. Stops.
LENA
When we get them. I don’t want
money and I don’t want an apology.
MARCUS
What do you want?
LENA
Their names.
(beat)
All of them.
CUT TO BLACK.
Featured role · MARCUS'S MOTHER — THE ONLY PERSON WHO CANNOT BE FOOLED
GLORIA REED
CHARACTER PROFILE
Black female, 67. Retired hospital administrator; thirty years reading charts, budgets, liars and administrators. Robe, mug of tea, answers on the second ring. Sharp, furious at being helped, “I’m fine” delivered in a tone that dares you to disagree. She read the caller correctly for four full minutes — then he said one sentence about her son and she stopped reading. She knows exactly which sentence it was.
She counts stairs out loud now. She finds her own handset on Marcus’s desk and a second phone in his drawer and says nothing (Ep 23). In Ep 28 she tells him the sentence, and answers his worst moment with the best line in the series.
Signature line: “You didn’t lose your mother, Marcus. You lost your argument.”
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode One — "THE SECOND RING"
Read for the role of GLORIA REED.
See The Character Script
UNKNOWN CALLER
Season One ·Episode One — "THE SECOND RING"
EPISODE ONE
“THE SECOND RING”
INT. GLORIA REED’S KITCHEN – PHILADELPHIA – NIGHT
A beige corded telephone on the wall. It RINGS — an analog
bell, too loud for a small room.
GLORIA REED, 67, robe, mug of tea. She crosses and answers on
the second ring. She always answers on the second ring.
GLORIA
Hello?
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
(warm, unhurried)
Good evening — is this Mrs. Gloria
Reed?
GLORIA
It is.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
Mrs. Reed, my name is David Owens,
I’m with the fraud prevention desk.
I’m sorry to call this late. Do you
have a minute for me?
Gloria sets the mug down. Sits. Thirty years a hospital
administrator — she knows how to take a call.
GLORIA
What’s happened.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
Nothing yet. That’s why I’m
calling.
A beat of nothing. He lets her have it.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.) (CONT’D)
There were two attempts on your
savings account this evening. Both
declined. I’d like to keep it that
way.
GLORIA
Two.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
Eleven minutes apart. Somebody is
being patient with you, ma’am. I
don’t like patient.
CLOSE — her hand finding a pen. Pulling the grocery pad
toward her.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.) (CONT’D)
I’m going to walk you through some
verification and it is going to be
tedious and I apologize in advance.
GLORIA
(almost warm)
You’re fine.
She writes. Neat as a chart note.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
One more thing and I’ll let you go.
Anyone else with access to the
account? Spouse, child?
GLORIA
My son.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
Signature authority?
GLORIA
No. No, he — he’s busy. He works.
A small pause. Something in the pause is listening.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
What’s his name, Mrs. Reed?
GLORIA
Marcus.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
(gently)
Then here’s what I’d ask. Don’t
call Marcus tonight. Not till we’ve
closed this out. If he checks and
there’s a hold on the account,
he’ll be angry with you. And this
isn’t your fault.
Gloria doesn’t answer right away.
GLORIA
All right.
CLOSE — the pad. Nine digits in her handwriting.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
Read that back for me?
She reads it back. Every digit. Careful.
MATCH CUT TO:
INT. CALL FLOOR – KOLKATA – DAY
The same nine digits, on a monitor. Fluorescent white. Rows
of desks. Somebody’s birthday cake is out on the far table
under a paper crown.
A headset comes off. RAVI SHARMA, 26, rubs his ear. Types a
note without looking at the screen.
RAVI
(under his breath,
Bengali — SUBTITLED)
Sorry.
He puts the headset back on. Dials.
CUT TO BLACK.
Episode Twenty-Eight — “THE SENTENCE”
EPISODE TWENTY-EIGHT
“THE SENTENCE”
INT. GLORIA’S KITCHEN – PHILADELPHIA – NIGHT
Marcus washing up. Gloria at the table with the cane hooked
on the chair.
GLORIA
You’ve never asked me why I didn’t
call you.
The water runs.
MARCUS
You were on the floor, Ma. You
couldn’t reach —
GLORIA
Before that. I had the phone in my
hand for two hours before that.
Marcus turns the tap off.
GLORIA (CONT’D)
He said: don’t call Marcus tonight.
He’ll be angry with you.
(beat)
And I thought — yes. That’s right.
She says it without self-pity. It is the worst possible way
to say it.
GLORIA (CONT’D)
A man I had known for four minutes
understood this family faster than
I did. That’s what I can’t put
down. Not the money.
MARCUS
Ma —
GLORIA
So ask me the question you’ve
wanted to ask since October.
MARCUS
I don’t have a —
GLORIA
Ask it.
And it comes out of him before he can stop it, after four
months of holding it, in a voice that is not raised at all.
MARCUS
How could you be so stupid.
The kitchen. The clock. Nothing.
GLORIA
(evenly)
There he is.
Marcus’s hands are still wet.
GLORIA (CONT’D)
I read your article. Fourteen
thousand people read your article.
(beat)
Loneliness that hasn’t been named
yet. That’s very good. You always
could write.
She takes her cane off the chair.
GLORIA (CONT’D)
You didn’t lose your mother,
Marcus.
(beat)
You lost your argument.
She goes to bed. It takes her a while and he does not help
her.
Marcus alone in his mother’s kitchen.
CLOSE — the wall by the door. A clean, unfaded rectangle in
the paint, and two empty screw holes, where a telephone used
to be.
CUT TO BLACK.
Featured role · FLOOR AGENT, KOLKATA (HINDI / BENGALI)
RAVI SHARMA
CHARACTER PROFILE
South Asian male, 26. Computer science degree, two years out, twenty-six months into a job that is “temporary.” He is the voice on Gloria’s call in Episode 1 (credited as MAN’S VOICE) — warm, unhurried, very good. The best listener on the floor: he can hear a marriage in the background of a call. That’s why he converts higher than agents with better English, and it is what’s killing him. He apologizes to the dial tone in Bengali after every disconnect and doesn’t know he does it.
His rule is no grandparent scripts. Ep 11, short-staffed, he works one — Robert Carter, two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars — and the floor applauds. He carries a hotline number in his wallet until the ink wears off one digit. His father died of something treatable while the family sat on hold with an insurance company; he was nineteen and holding the phone. Must be fluent in Hindi and/or Bengali; English with a Kolkata accent.
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode One — "THE SECOND RING"
Read for the role of RAVI SHARMA.
See The Character Script
UNKNOWN CALLER
Season One ·Episode One — "THE SECOND RING"
EPISODE ONE
“THE SECOND RING”
INT. GLORIA REED’S KITCHEN – PHILADELPHIA – NIGHT
A beige corded telephone on the wall. It RINGS — an analog
bell, too loud for a small room.
GLORIA REED, 67, robe, mug of tea. She crosses and answers on
the second ring. She always answers on the second ring.
GLORIA
Hello?
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
(warm, unhurried)
Good evening — is this Mrs. Gloria
Reed?
GLORIA
It is.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
Mrs. Reed, my name is David Owens,
I’m with the fraud prevention desk.
I’m sorry to call this late. Do you
have a minute for me?
Gloria sets the mug down. Sits. Thirty years a hospital
administrator — she knows how to take a call.
GLORIA
What’s happened.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
Nothing yet. That’s why I’m
calling.
A beat of nothing. He lets her have it.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.) (CONT’D)
There were two attempts on your
savings account this evening. Both
declined. I’d like to keep it that
way.
GLORIA
Two.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
Eleven minutes apart. Somebody is
being patient with you, ma’am. I
don’t like patient.
CLOSE — her hand finding a pen. Pulling the grocery pad
toward her.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.) (CONT’D)
I’m going to walk you through some
verification and it is going to be
tedious and I apologize in advance.
GLORIA
(almost warm)
You’re fine.
She writes. Neat as a chart note.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
One more thing and I’ll let you go.
Anyone else with access to the
account? Spouse, child?
GLORIA
My son.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
Signature authority?
GLORIA
No. No, he — he’s busy. He works.
A small pause. Something in the pause is listening.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
What’s his name, Mrs. Reed?
GLORIA
Marcus.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
(gently)
Then here’s what I’d ask. Don’t
call Marcus tonight. Not till we’ve
closed this out. If he checks and
there’s a hold on the account,
he’ll be angry with you. And this
isn’t your fault.
Gloria doesn’t answer right away.
GLORIA
All right.
CLOSE — the pad. Nine digits in her handwriting.
MAN’S VOICE (V.O.)
Read that back for me?
She reads it back. Every digit. Careful.
MATCH CUT TO:
INT. CALL FLOOR – KOLKATA – DAY
The same nine digits, on a monitor. Fluorescent white. Rows
of desks. Somebody’s birthday cake is out on the far table
under a paper crown.
A headset comes off. RAVI SHARMA, 26, rubs his ear. Types a
note without looking at the screen.
RAVI
(under his breath,
Bengali — SUBTITLED)
Sorry.
He puts the headset back on. Dials.
CUT TO BLACK.
Featured role · FLOOR LEAD, KOLKATA — THE CRAFTSMAN (HINDI / BENGALI)
DEV MALHOTRA
CHARACTER PROFILE
South Asian male, 44. Eleven years on the floor. Eight seconds to qualify a mark, seventeen emotional registers on command, and — the thing that makes him unbearable — a magnificent, patient, generous teacher. Handset only, cord wrapped once around his wrist: “A headset lets you forget there’s a person.” Keeps his own laminated 2015 script in a drawer and knows the date he was supposed to quit.
The show’s Mike: a code, a competence, an exhaustion, and no illusions. He is the one who identifies what Marcus really is — by ear, from a recording, in Ep 18 (“That man is not police. Police don’t sell.”). No medical scripts, and Ep 22 explains why. Same episode, he stays on the line four minutes with Robert Carter and lets an old man talk. Fluent Hindi and/or Bengali.
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode Seven — "THE CALLBACK"
Read for the role of DEV MALHOTRA.
See The Character Script
UNKNOWN CALLER
Season One ·Episode Seven — "THE CALLBACK"
EPISODE SEVEN
“THE CALLBACK”
INT. STAIRWELL – MARCUS’S OFFICE BUILDING – DAY
Nine days later. Marcus takes the call in the fire stairs,
one flight up from his floor, because that is where people go
to have conversations they don’t want overheard.
He has a printed one-page in his hand. He has been carrying
it for nine days.
DEV (V.O.)
(no greeting)
You said thirty percent.
MARCUS
I did.
DEV (V.O.)
Where’d you get thirty.
MARCUS
(finding the line on the
page)
Industry baseline on cold-open
telephony is a four to six percent
conversion. Yours is running at
what I’d estimate is eleven, which
is excellent, which is why I’m
calling. If you restructure the
first nine seconds and move
confirmation to the back half,
you’re looking at a lift of —
DEV (V.O.)
What’s your name.
Marcus stops. He didn’t plan for the easiest question.
On the landing wall: a building directory. AARON GLASS, DDS.
SUITE 402.
MARCUS
Aaron.
A pause. The pause is not suspicious. The pause is bored.
DEV (V.O.)
Aaron. You’re selling to me.
MARCUS
I’m —
DEV (V.O.)
Don’t sell to me.
A CLICK. Something opens up on the line — room tone,
distance, a second connection stacking on the first.
Then, small and clear and eight thousand miles away, a woman
answers her telephone.
WOMAN (V.O.)
Hello?
DEV (V.O.)
(quietly, to Marcus)
Sell to her.
CUT TO BLACK.
Episode Twenty-Nine — “THE TRADE”
EPISODE TWENTY-NINE
“THE TRADE”
INT. STAIRWELL – OFFICE PARK, KOLKATA – DAY
The same concrete step Ravi sat on in Episode Nine. Dev sits
down next to him with two cups of tea and hands one over.
DEV
There’s no shift Monday.
RAVI
I heard it was the air
conditioning.
DEV
It’s not the air conditioning.
Dev puts a folder on the step between them. Ravi doesn’t
touch it.
DEV (CONT’D)
They will want somebody. Not us —
the lawyers, the disclosure, the
people who are going to be asking
questions in about three weeks.
They will want a name, and the name
they get will decide who spends
time in a room.
(beat)
There’s a name in there that isn’t
ours.
RAVI
Who is he?
DEV
He’s the man who made your numbers.
Ravi opens the folder. A photograph, a company registration,
an address in Philadelphia. And a name that means nothing to
him.
RAVI
Aaron Vance isn’t real.
DEV
No.
Ravi looks at the tea in his hands for a long moment.
RAVI
He was kind to me.
DEV
Yes.
Ravi takes out his wallet. The card is still in there, the
edges soft, one digit worn to nothing.
He puts the card back. He picks up the folder instead.
INT. MARCUS’S APARTMENT – NIGHT
It takes ninety minutes.
The domain suspends. The registration flags. The bank account
freezes with a notice that begins We regret. The testimonial
page 404s. The stock photograph of a man who is not Marcus
goes white.
Marcus watches Aaron Vance disappear off two monitors in real
time.
He is not afraid. We keep waiting for him to be afraid.
He opens a new browser tab.
A registered agent form. State of Delaware. He fills it in
from memory now; he has done this before.
CLOSE — the cursor blinking in the field marked ENTITY NAME.
He types.
We do not see what he types.
And Marcus Reed is smiling, alone, in the dark, and he does
not know that he is.
CUT TO BLACK.
Featured role · QUALITY ASSURANCE ANALYST, KOLKATA
PRIYA NAIR
CHARACTER PROFILE
South Asian female, 29. Six months in. Smarter than everyone in the building. Reviews call recordings for quality scoring at 1.5x speed while eating; has listened to more human ruin than anyone in the series, professionally, with a rubric. Eats lunch alone in her car with the engine off. A flash drive taped inside a tampon box in her bag — practical, not symbolic.
Not a whistleblower: accumulating leverage, and if there’s a buyer she will sell. Reported a manager at her last job, was believed, and was quietly made unemployable for fourteen months. Almost entirely a non-verbal role — the performance is in what she watches and what she copies. Sides are action-based.
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode Nineteen — "FORTY DOLLARS"
Read for the role of PRIYA NAIR.
See The Character Script
UNKNOWN CALLER
Season One ·Episode Nineteen — "FORTY DOLLARS"
EPISODE NINETEEN
“FORTY DOLLARS”
INT. MARCUS’S APARTMENT – NIGHT
An email, open on the screen. Marcus reading it for the
second time.
FROM: A. MEHTA
SUBJECT: Q3 floor recognition — vendor
“Aaron — we do not normally extend this to vendors. The
floor asked. Please do not read anything into the amount; it
is calculated the same way for everyone. — A.”
Marcus opens the account. The shell account. Meridian Lead
Systems, opened in a weekend, checking, no overdraft
protection.
CLOSE — the balance.
$40.00
He looks at it.
He does not move the cursor. He does not transfer it out. He
does not close the window.
Six seconds.
The floor asked.
He closes the laptop. Sits in the dark with it on his knees.
Then he opens it again and looks at the balance one more
time.
INT. CALL FLOOR – QA BAY – KOLKATA – DAY
PRIYA NAIR, 29, headphones on, scoring a recording at 1.5x
while eating with her free hand. Her rubric is half filled
in.
She pauses. Types a company name into a second window.
MERIDIAN LEAD SYSTEMS — registered agent, a suite number in
Delaware, an incorporation date eleven weeks old, and behind
it nothing at all.
Priya looks at it for a while.
She does not open the flag form.
She screenshots it, drags it to a folder that is not on the
company drive, and goes back to scoring.
CUT TO BLACK.
Episode Twenty-Seven — “THE EXIT”
EPISODE TWENTY-SEVEN
“THE EXIT”
INT. CAR PARK – OFFICE PARK, KOLKATA – DAY
Priya in her car with the engine off, eating lunch, as she
does every day. A laptop on the passenger seat. An email,
composed, four attachments, addressed to a consumer-affairs
desk in Delhi.
Her thumb over the trackpad.
She sends it.
She finishes her lunch. All of it. Then she goes back inside.
INT. CALL FLOOR – KOLKATA – LATER
Priya at her desk with her bag already on her shoulder,
trying to leave a room without leaving it noticeably.
Arjun is standing at the door.
Everything stops in her chest.
ARJUN
Priya.
She turns.
ARJUN (CONT’D)
Take your bag.
He holds the door open for her.
She walks through it. He does not watch her go.
INT. ARJUN’S GLASS OFFICE – CONTINUOUS
Arjun begins the shutdown the way a man closes a shop for the
night. A sequence. He has clearly rehearsed it. He is not
hurried and he is not frightened.
Dev in the doorway.
DEV
You knew.
ARJUN
Eight months.
DEV
You waited for her.
ARJUN
I waited for anyone.
He pulls a folder from the drawer. Inside: a lease. Signed. A
different address, four kilometres east, dated six weeks ago.
ARJUN (CONT’D)
A disclosure has to come from an
employee, Dev. It cannot come from
- If it comes from me it is a
confession and if it comes from her
it is a leak, and a leak is a thing
that happens to a company.
He turns the framed photograph of his daughters face-down and
puts it in a box.
ARJUN (CONT’D)
Tell the floor there’s no shift
Monday. Tell them it’s the air
conditioning.
CUT TO BLACK.
Featured role · PHOENIX — THE ONE WHO FOUGHT BACK
LENA ALVAREZ
CHARACTER PROFILE
Latina, 41. Opening a restaurant in Phoenix, second attempt; the first one was ground up by a rent increase eleven years ago and she moved back in with her mother at thirty. Now she answers every scam call on purpose, sounds gullible on purpose, and logs each one — time, number, script type, accent, hold music — in marbled composition notebooks. Five of them by Episode 20. Her handwriting gets smaller as they fill.
She becomes Marcus’s closest ally and moral cover and their meeting in her half-finished dining room (Ep 25) is the warmest scene in the series. In Ep 27 she opens notebook four and finds, in her own handwriting, a number she has just seen in Marcus’s call history. What she does with that is the season’s last real turn. Spanish helpful.
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode Thirteen — "THE NOTEBOOK"
Read for the role of LENA ALVAREZ.
See The Character Script
UNKNOWN CALLER
Season One ·Episode Thirteen — "THE NOTEBOOK"
EPISODE THIRTEEN
“THE NOTEBOOK”
INT. UNFINISHED RESTAURANT – PHOENIX – DAY
Drop cloths. A bar with no stools. A hand-painted sign
leaning against the wall: GRAND OPENING — NEXT MONTH.
LENA ALVAREZ, 41, on a ladder with a paint roller. Her phone
rings on the sawhorse. She looks at it. Unknown number.
She climbs down and answers it. On purpose.
LENA
(bright, a little slow,
entirely fake)
Hello?
ROBOVOICE (V.O.)
— important message regarding your
business listing. Press one to
speak with a specialist.
She presses one. Wedges the phone against her shoulder. Opens
a marbled composition notebook to a page already half full.
SPECIALIST (V.O.)
Ma’am, we’re showing your Google
listing is unverified and scheduled
for removal —
LENA
Oh no. Really? That sounds serious.
She is writing. Time. Number. Hold music — she notes the
song. The transfer delay — she counts it under her breath
while he talks.
SPECIALIST (V.O.)
It is serious, ma’am, but I can fix
it today —
LENA
You’re a lifesaver. Now what did
you say your name was again? I want
to write it down properly.
She has learned to sound gullible. She is very good at it.
She has never once considered what that makes her.
CLOSE — the page. Twenty-three entries. Today.
INT. UNFINISHED RESTAURANT – NIGHT
Lena photographs the page. Posts it to a small-business group
— 41 members.
She goes back to painting.
The phone buzzes. Then again. Then it does not stop.
CLOSE — the screen, notifications stacking. Comments. Then,
at the top of the group page: 418 MEMBERS.
She scrolls. Somebody has posted their own log. Somebody else
has posted three.
One comment, from an account in Philadelphia:
“I can organize this properly if you want. Data is what I do
for a living.”
CUT TO BLACK.
Episode Twenty-Five — “PHOENIX”
EPISODE TWENTY-FIVE
“PHOENIX”
INT. UNFINISHED RESTAURANT – PHOENIX – EVENING
Two weeks later. The dining room is further along — chairs
stacked, one table set up in the middle of it under a work
light.
On the table: five marbled composition notebooks and a wall
of printouts taped up behind them, dense, color-coded,
entirely analog.
Lena puts a plate down in front of Marcus. He looks at it
like a man who has not been fed by another person in a long
time.
LENA
Eat that and then tell me it’s not
a system.
He eats. He genuinely eats.
Then he gets up and goes to the wall and reads it properly.
Column by column. It takes him a while.
MARCUS
You’ve got transfer latency in
here.
LENA
The pause. Before they hand you
off.
MARCUS
You timed the pause.
LENA
Six hundred and eleven times.
Marcus turns around. And what is on his face is not strategy.
It is the specific delight of a professional meeting an
amateur who has, by sheer stubbornness, built something
better than the professional would have.
MARCUS
Lena. This is — do you know what
this is?
LENA
It’s a notebook.
MARCUS
It’s a routing map.
She almost smiles. She has been carrying these for a year and
nobody has ever said a sentence like that to her.
LENA
Nobody’s ever taken these
seriously.
MARCUS
I take them seriously.
And he does. Both things are true and they are true at the
same time, and that is the whole problem with him.
She starts stacking the notebooks to hand over. Stops.
LENA
When we get them. I don’t want
money and I don’t want an apology.
MARCUS
What do you want?
LENA
Their names.
(beat)
All of them.
CUT TO BLACK.
Featured role · EX-FTC ANALYST — THE MAN WHO DRAWS THE MAP
DANIEL PARK
CHARACTER PROFILE
Asian-American male, 39. Former FTC Consumer Protection analyst, now an independent consultant alone in a rented office, narrating his work aloud to an empty room. He built a model that identified the gateway network carrying the most fraud traffic in North America at 94% accuracy, presented it, was thanked, and is no longer at the FTC. Divorced; an empty fish tank in his apartment bought for his daughter Mina, filtered, lit, running, no water. He turns it on anyway.
Ep 19: he gives Marcus the full gateway list “for context” because he needs his work to be used more than he needs it used well. Being right destroyed his career and his marriage and did not stop a single call.
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode Twenty — "THE MAP"
Read for the role of DANIEL PARK.
See The Character Script
UNKNOWN CALLER
Season One ·Episode Twenty — "THE MAP"
EPISODE TWENTY
“THE MAP”
INT. RENTED OFFICE – PHILADELPHIA – DAY
One room. Two monitors. A filing system that makes sense to
exactly one person. DANIEL PARK, 39, has been alone in here
for fourteen months and it shows in small ways — he finishes
his own sentences out loud.
Marcus sits in the only other chair.
DANIEL
You read the whole thing.
MARCUS
I read the whole thing.
DANIEL
Nobody reads the whole thing.
There’s an appendix. There’s an
appendix nobody has ever mentioned
to me.
MARCUS
Appendix C. The Cayman routing hub.
Something happens in Daniel Park’s face that is almost
embarrassing to watch.
He turns to the drawer. Comes back with a drive.
DANIEL
Ninety-four percent confidence.
Every gateway, every intermediary,
every carrier that’s been sitting
on complaints. Three federal
agencies have this and none of them
have done anything with it in
fourteen months.
He holds it. He doesn’t hand it over yet.
DANIEL (CONT’D)
What are you going to do with it?
MARCUS
Give it to somebody who’ll actually
use it.
Daniel nods. He hears the sentence he wants.
Marcus takes the drive. Turns it over. Then, easily, like an
afterthought:
MARCUS (CONT’D)
Which of these carriers actually
looks?
DANIEL
…Why?
MARCUS
So I know where to point you.
A beat. Daniel accepts it. Of course he accepts it. He has
been waiting fourteen months for somebody to want his work.
DANIEL
Two of them. Maybe two.
INT. DANIEL’S APARTMENT – NIGHT
A fish tank on a stand. Filter running, light on, gravel, a
small ceramic castle.
No water.
Daniel sits down in front of it with his coat still on and
watches it.
CUT TO BLACK.
Featured role · COLUMBUS, OHIO — THE COST
ROBERT CARTER
CHARACTER PROFILE
White male, 71. Taught high school history for thirty-four years; forty-three years married to Elaine. Two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars gone. “We’ll get it back,” for nine episodes. He turns real research skill on the people who took his money — magnificent and unbearable — and starts calling every number in his call log back, every day, politely, trying to get someone to explain it to him.
In Ep 22 Dev stays on the line with him for four minutes and Robert hangs up with terrible hope: “There’s a decent one. I found a decent one.” The refrigerator of overlapping grandchildren’s photos is his set.
SIDES
Audition sides
Read for the role of ROBERT CARTER.
Episode Twenty-Three — "THE MAN WHO KEEPS CALLING"
See The Character Script
UNKNOWN CALLER
Season One ·Read for the role of ROBERT CARTER.
EPISODE TWENTY-THREE
“THE MAN WHO KEEPS CALLING”
INT. CALL FLOOR – KOLKATA – DAY
An inbound light. Nobody takes inbounds. Dev picks it up
because he is standing there.
ROBERT (V.O.)
Yes, good evening — or morning,
I’m never sure. My name is Robert
Carter. I’ve called before.
Dev’s hand stops on the cord.
He knows this voice. He has heard it four times now.
DEV
I know.
A silence on the line. Robert was ready for a hang-up. He was
not ready for that.
ROBERT (V.O.)
…You do.
DEV
Go ahead, Mr. Carter.
And Robert Carter talks.
We stay on Dev. Handset, cord, fluorescent light, forty
people working around him at ordinary volume.
ROBERT (V.O.)
I taught history for thirty-four
years. I taught fourteen-year-olds
to check a source. I told them,
every September, the first thing
you ask is who benefits from you
believing this.
Dev listens.
ROBERT (V.O.) (CONT’D)
My wife has a refrigerator with
about sixty photographs on it. She
puts each new one over the last one
so the old ones still show at the
corners. She’s done that for twenty
years. I never asked her why. I
think about that now more than I
think about the money, which I
understand does not make any sense.
DEV
It makes sense.
ROBERT (V.O.)
She hasn’t put a new one up since
October.
Dev closes his eyes.
ROBERT (V.O.) (CONT’D)
You’re the first person who’s
stayed on the line.
DEV
I know.
Four minutes. He does not apologize. He does not confess. He
does not hang up.
ROBERT (V.O.)
Can you tell me how it was done?
A long silence. Long enough that Robert says his name again,
gently, to check.
DEV
He was very good, Mr. Carter.
(beat)
That’s all it was. He was very
good, and you were on the telephone
with your son.
On the other end, an old man makes a small sound and covers
it.
ROBERT (V.O.)
Thank you.
The line goes dead.
Dev sets the handset in its cradle. Unwinds the cord from his
wrist, slowly, all the way.
He opens the bottom drawer. Inside, laminated, yellowed at
the edges: a script. His own first one. 2015.
He looks at it.
He closes the drawer.
INT. GLORIA’S KITCHEN – PHILADELPHIA – NIGHT
Gloria at the table with a laptop she has to hold at arm’s
length.
An article. Fourteen thousand reads. Her son’s byline.
CLOSE — a highlighted line:
“The most reliable predictor of victimization isn’t age. It’s
loneliness that hasn’t been named yet.”
Gloria reads it twice.
She closes the laptop.
CUT TO BLACK.
Featured role · COLUMBUS, OHIO
ELAINE CARTER
CHARACTER PROFILE
White female, 68. Robert’s wife. Answered on the second ring. Her arc is shame and secrecy, and the 2 a.m. phone call to their daughter Melissa in Ep 16 — ninety seconds, one unbroken take on her face — that carries the most important sentence in the series.
Signature line: “I know you think we were foolish. I need you to know that I knew his voice. I knew it.”
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode Nine — "JASON"
Read for the role of ELAINE CARTER.
See The Character Script
UNKNOWN CALLER
Season One ·Episode Nine — "JASON"
EPISODE NINE
“JASON”
INT. CALL FLOOR – KOLKATA – NIGHT
No Marcus. Half the desks empty — a festival, a flu, it
doesn’t matter. Dev walks the row with a printout.
DEV
Ravi. Take the family sheet.
RAVI
I don’t do those.
DEV
I know.
Dev sets the sheet down anyway and keeps walking. He does not
make it an order. He does not have to.
Ravi looks at it for a long moment. Then puts on the headset.
INT. CARTER KITCHEN – COLUMBUS, OHIO – MORNING
A refrigerator covered in grandchildren — school photos in
overlapping layers, each new one laid slightly over the last
so the old ones still peek out at the edges.
The phone rings. ELAINE CARTER, 68, checks the screen.
CLOSE — the screen: JASON.
She answers on the second ring, the way she always does when
it’s one of the children.
ELAINE
Hi honey —
RAVI (V.O.)
(hesitant, ashamed,
seventeen years old and
he has crashed the car)
Mom.
Elaine stops moving.
RAVI (V.O.) (CONT’D)
Mom, I’m in trouble.
ELAINE
What’s happened. Jason. What’s
happened.
RAVI (V.O.)
I need you to not tell Dad yet.
Please. Can you do that for me?
Off Elaine’s face — forty-three years of being the person
who holds everything together, arriving instantly.
ELAINE
I’m here, baby. I’m right here.
INT. CALL FLOOR – KOLKATA – CONTINUOUS
Ravi’s eyes are closed. His voice is perfect.
CUT TO:
A number on a monitor.
$214,000
The floor APPLAUDS. Somebody claps Ravi on the shoulder
twice. Dev, from the far end, gives him a single nod, which
is the most he gives anyone.
Ravi smiles. It works, mostly.
INT. STAIRWELL – OFFICE PARK, KOLKATA – LATER
Shift over. Everyone gone. Ravi sits on a concrete step with
his bag between his feet for forty minutes.
He takes a card out of his wallet. A phone number,
handwritten, edges gone soft.
He looks at it.
He puts it back.
CUT TO BLACK.
Episode Sixteen — “2 A.M.”
EPISODE SIXTEEN
“2 A.M.”
INT. CARTER KITCHEN – COLUMBUS – NIGHT
One light over the stove. ELAINE CARTER at the table in a
robe with the phone against her ear.
We stay on her face. We do not cut away. Not once.
MELISSA (V.O.)
(thick with sleep)
Mom? Mom, it’s two in the —
ELAINE
I need to tell you something and I
need to do it now, because if I
wait until morning I won’t.
She tells her. We hear almost none of it — Elaine’s voice
drops below the level of the room and stays there for a long
time.
Then:
MELISSA (V.O.)
How much.
ELAINE
Two hundred and fourteen.
A silence.
MELISSA (V.O.)
Thousand.
ELAINE
Yes.
Elaine’s hand finds the edge of the table.
MELISSA (V.O.)
Mom — did you not think to call
me? Did you not think to just call
Jason? He was at work. He was at
his job, Mom, you could have called
his job and asked for him and none
of this —
ELAINE
I know.
MELISSA (V.O.)
Then how did — I’m sorry. I’m
sorry. I’m not — how did this
happen?
And there it is, underneath the compassion, arriving before
she can stop it. Elaine hears it. Of course she hears it. She
has been listening to this daughter for forty years.
ELAINE
I know you think we were foolish.
MELISSA (V.O.)
I didn’t say that.
ELAINE
I need you to know that I knew his
voice.
(beat)
I knew it.
PULL WIDE, finally —
— and in the dark of the hallway behind her, standing where
she can’t see him, ROBERT CARTER. Listening. He has been
there the whole time.
He turns and goes back to bed without a sound.
CUT TO BLACK.
Featured role · THE CARTERS' DAUGHTER (VOICE-OVER)
MELISSA CARTER
CHARACTER PROFILE
Female, 40s. Voice-over only in Ep 16 — the daughter on the other end of Elaine’s 2 a.m. call. Tired, then frightened, then trying not to sound either. One session.
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode Sixteen — "2 A.M."
Read for the role of MELISSA CARTER.
See The Character Script
UNKNOWN CALLER
Season One ·Episode Sixteen — "2 A.M."
EPISODE SIXTEEN
“2 A.M.”
INT. CARTER KITCHEN – COLUMBUS – NIGHT
One light over the stove. ELAINE CARTER at the table in a
robe with the phone against her ear.
We stay on her face. We do not cut away. Not once.
MELISSA (V.O.)
(thick with sleep)
Mom? Mom, it’s two in the —
ELAINE
I need to tell you something and I
need to do it now, because if I
wait until morning I won’t.
She tells her. We hear almost none of it — Elaine’s voice
drops below the level of the room and stays there for a long
time.
Then:
MELISSA (V.O.)
How much.
ELAINE
Two hundred and fourteen.
A silence.
MELISSA (V.O.)
Thousand.
ELAINE
Yes.
Elaine’s hand finds the edge of the table.
MELISSA (V.O.)
Mom — did you not think to call
me? Did you not think to just call
Jason? He was at work. He was at
his job, Mom, you could have called
his job and asked for him and none
of this —
ELAINE
I know.
MELISSA (V.O.)
Then how did — I’m sorry. I’m
sorry. I’m not — how did this
happen?
And there it is, underneath the compassion, arriving before
she can stop it. Elaine hears it. Of course she hears it. She
has been listening to this daughter for forty years.
ELAINE
I know you think we were foolish.
MELISSA (V.O.)
I didn’t say that.
ELAINE
I need you to know that I knew his
voice.
(beat)
I knew it.
PULL WIDE, finally —
— and in the dark of the hallway behind her, standing where
she can’t see him, ROBERT CARTER. Listening. He has been
there the whole time.
He turns and goes back to bed without a sound.
CUT TO BLACK.