Warfare cast share meaningful reason behind matching tattoos
Making Warfare was a truly bonding experience for the cast, who crafted a genuine brotherhood whilst portraying a group of real life Navy SEALs who found themselves stuck in a hideout in Ramadi, Iraq, when pinned down by enemy combatant in 2006.
The movie, directed by Alex Garland and war veteran Ray Mendoza, has an ensemble cast representing Mendoza and the men he served with and it recounts in real-time their fight for survival. Telling this story as truthfully as possible required an extensive amount of preparation and dedication from the cast, which led them to become a real team.
And after shooting finished the team were so close they decided to all get matching tattoos, which say "Call on Me" as a reference to the song that starts the movie, and so much more. For actors Michael Gandolfini, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Kit Connor, and Cosmo Jarvis it was a meaningful thing for them to do, and an important way to prove they have each other's back.
When asked about it, Gandolfini explains that making the film together taught the cast "what it meant to be a young man, how to look out for each other, [and] honesty" as he adds: "I believe that all of us walked away with principles that changed us forever as young men, and [we] learned what kind of older men we would like to be.
"There was a collective responsibility in protecting one another and the tattoos that we got it's three words, Call on Me, which was a direct connection to the opening of the film and the SEALs, but also a result that anywhere we go, anytime we have a hard time, we can call one another. We can call one of our castmates and they'll always be there for us.
"There was a different feeling after this movie when you walk out into the world and something bad happens and you have 12, 13 guys that are there for you, it's different."
Woon-A-Tai felt particularly moved by this idea, adding: "In a lot of other sets it kind of feels, if I may, like in a sense summer camp where you know you're never probably going to see these guys ever again, or see these people again, and the love we built that was so, so real and so strong.
"I felt like personally leaving with a tattoo kind of forever —because it's going be on my body forever— I will prove to these guys that this is not just a summer camp and this is not just words, that I'm leaving a mark on my body forever. And that's the love I have for these guys, that's gonna be there forever."
It was the training that they went through before filming began that helped forge this bond, Connor reveals: "We did a three 3 1/2 week bootcamp at the beginning, instructed by Ray, where we learned a lot in terms of the technical stuff that we would need to be able to do the project, but then I think one of the results of that was we had an incredible bond formed so that, by the time we started shooting, we already had this really strong relationship with one another.
"It kind of meant that a lot of the emotional and psychological work that one might need to do as an actor for a role like this wasn't quite so necessary, because we already had this emotional understanding with one another."
Woon-A-Tai remarks that they gave "a lot of blood, sweat and tears" to the project, and the pressure they felt to do justice to Mendoza and his fellow soldiers meant that the cast "were there for each other in a way that I've never experienced with other castmates," as he went on: "Our boot camp was very much what set us up to be the brothers that we are today, and that's because of Ray Mendoza."
The co-director's intention with Warfare was for it to be a personal letter to his fellow SEAL Elliot, who was seriously wounded during the raid and doesn't remember what happened that day. This gave actor Cosmo Jarvis an interesting responsibility as his onscreen counterpart.
"Elliott can't remember what happened to him and so I couldn't necessarily mine Elliott's mind for information about it, but I did have many of his and Ray's other colleagues to talk to and to help with research. We all did," the Shogun star explains.
"And their presence, the presence of all the SEALs and the fact that they were enthusiastic about this initiative and that they wanted to help us and we wanted to help them, was this very unusual, really quite excellent reciprocal arrangement. They would help us, we would help them, and it created a very enthusiastic work environment."
Gandolfini reiterated the importance of having their real life counterparts involved in the making of the movie, sharing: "Ray and Alex and all of these men that were a part of helping tell the story for Elliott [created] a completely different thing about this whole experience, our job [was] an actual application of service that was we can show Elliott what happened to him and he can learn. There's a direct positive result."
Woon-A-Tai, too, felt a responsibility while playing Mendoza in front of the man himself, though he adds that it was also an honour to do so: "First and foremost, it was an amazing opportunity. I was grateful to represent a story so personal, probably one of the most traumatic experiences of his life and for him to trust this Canadian kid who has never been in the military ever, to trust me with his personal story, it is an understatement to say that I'm grateful.
"Of course there was pressure on my shoulders, we all had pressure on our shoulders, but of course the guy was sat right behind the camera. But in all honesty, I don't want to say any of this because there was more pressure on his shoulders than there was mine.
"I'm just an actor, he's telling a personal story, a traumatic history. He's also representing on behalf of a whole community that, in all honesty, gets misrepresented through film [all the time]. And so he had way more pressure on his shoulders than I could have ever had."
It was "essential" for the cast to have Mendoza's input in the movie, Jarvis adds, and it helped to make them feel closer to the story: "It's an amazing thing to be able to be directed by somebody who is directing you with the sole purpose of truthfully recreating something that he lived through, it just never happens.
"He's an amazing director and the way he communicates as a leader and the way he inspires his workforce his is unlike anything I've ever witnessed."
"He's an incredible teacher, an incredible man in a lot of ways and he knew exactly what to do," Connor adds. "He knew exactly how much to give us to go on, how much prep to to give us, he was playing the long game with us. The whole bootcamp was really a way of bonding us, it was a way of teaching us the skills, [but] it was a way of best preparing us for the for the job at hand."
Jarvis calls making Warfare a "profound experience" because of all the things he and his castmates learned in the process.
"It was a very unusual and unique experience," he remarks. "Just in general it was a unique and unusual experience, but in terms of acting it was also a very unique experience. It was a job during which the compelling reasons to want to do our best work extended beyond the normal individualistic reasons.
"They were reasons that we all shared because of the people involved in this, and the reason for this existing in the first place, which was to help somebody recreate an event that happened to them so that they could communicate what that experience was. It all just felt like it was a profound experience."
Warfare premieres in UK cinemas on Friday, 18 April.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Yahoo
Alex Garland's ‘Warfare' Generated Tons of Controversy. Here's Why You Should See It Anyway
Warfare, the new film from co-directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, appears to be one of the most realistic and grueling combat films ever made. It's one of this year's best films, but it's doubtful you'll be able to stomach it more than once (if that). It would be trite for anyone who's not seen combat to say that Warfare is a realistic depiction of battle, but it vibrates with the nauseating feeling of authenticity. The film has generated a fair amount of controversy, with some identifying it as jingoist propaganda, but that could not be further from the truth. Garland is the prolific screenwriter behind 28 Days Later (and the upcoming 28 Years Later), and the director of Ex Machina (2015) and Annihilation (2018). His previous film, 2024's Civil War, was one of the best American films of last year. It was a gritty but simultaneously poetic piece of speculative fiction concerning a Stateside civil war, the roots and details of which remained delightfully unexplained. The point was not what brought us there, but how we extricate ourselves from it. Civil War diluted its queasier elements with a thrumming soundtrack, a warm central relationship between characters played by Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny, and a satisfying-if-brutal climax in which insurgents storm the White House and, well, you can guess the rest. Warfare contains none of those audience concessions. It's grisly, unpleasant, genuinely horrifying filmmaking which is emphatically not a piece of propaganda nor entertainment but rather a gigantic question mark over the idea of combat itself. It's a spectacular piece of cinema, one of the most visceral and immersive movies you're likely to see; but it's extremely unpleasant to wrote and directed the picture with Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL, on whose experience the film is based. Mendoza worked as a military adviser on Civil War, and his influence is felt in that film's authentic milieu (particularly that final Oval Office skirmish). Warfare, which takes place mostly in real-time, chronicles a mission undertaken by Mendoza's platoon in November 2006 in Ramadi, Iraq, which went terribly wrong. We watch as the group — led by Will Poulter's Eric and including D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Mendoza and Cosmo Jarvis as his best friend, Elliot — takes over a residential home, knocking down a wall that separates their apartment from another family and confining the civilians to the basement. Elliot and another sniper, Frank (Taylor John Smith), take positions monitoring a building across the street. Slowly, activity starts building around the apartment block. Parents begin clearing their children off the street. An unseen assailant tosses a grenade into the apartment, and chaos ensues. From that point on, the film is a dire combat diary about the platoon's struggle to simply stay alive. Mendoza and Garland undertook what the former described as a 'detective-like approach' to unravel the different fragments of recollection from those involved. 'This film uses only their memories,' an opening title card tells us of Mendoza and his comrades. A statement at the very end of the film's credits goes further: 'This film is based on interviews with people involved, and a handful of photographs,' it explains. 'The film attempts to reconstruct the incident with as much accuracy as memory allows.' Warfare has provoked ire and controversy in certain circles over what some deem to be a thread of jingoistic patriotism running through the film. One wonders if those people have seen Garland and Mendoza's movie or simply judged the trailer. Much like Civil War, Warfare de-contextualizes the conflict and plainly presents, in Garland's words, 'an incident of warfare.' Just one, like many before and after. There is no politicizing, no monologues explaining the plot, or even errant dialogue hinting at the cause the main characters are striving towards. Warfare presents its characters and situations at face value, allowing the audience to put their own interpretation on events. There is no traditional film score, no musical stings, no reprieve from the sensory assault. As such, it's gratingly, brilliantly claustrophobic. As it focuses on a group of American military personnel and largely keeps off-screen the faceless 'jihadists' who are attacking them, one could draw inferences that the film is pro-American military, but to actually believe that would be to willfully ignore the message of the film, not to mention the craft behind it. It's simply a memory piece of those involved, and one senses that Garland and Mendoza would make an equally humane film about the other side of the conflict were they provided with that perspective. A brief coda, focusing on the Iraqi family in whose home most of the action unfolds, expresses unequivocally with whom the directors sympathize. Likewise, the film's final shot is a gut-punch of desperation. What was it all for?There is no heroic derring-do on display here, no moments where any of the ensemble have an opportunity to distinguish themselves with a bit of cool action. Warfare removes the inherent cinema behind violence, presenting it as it is: confusing, scary, and unceasing. There's not a single frame of this movie which is framed in an exciting or titillating manner. It seems impossible, and frankly a bit nauseating, to imagine that anyone would watch Warfare and be entertained by it, or think that there is anything glamorous about what's depicted. It's the harshest possible rebuke to the sexy, Miller-time combat depicted in Hollywood productions like Top Gun: Maverick, which functioned nominally as a hyped-up recruitment video. Warfare demands to be shown as the second half of a double bill with that film, so opposed and convincing is its stance. Warfare is certainly one of the most emphatically anti-war films ever made. It's a properly grueling experience which is commendable for the ringer through which it puts its audience, and for the sheer skill behind its filmmaking. It's highly unlikely you'll want to watch Warfare more than once (whether you want to stomach it at all is worth interrogating), but it's a film of remarkable integrity which unfailingly maintains the strength of its conviction. It offers viewers, from the comfort of their couches, a glimpse of a world they would be lucky never to see.
Geek Tyrant
3 days ago
- Geek Tyrant
Danny Boyle Explains 28 YEARS LATER Is the "Opposite" of What You'd Expect from a Zombie Sequel — GeekTyrant
If you're expecting 28 Years Later to go big in the way most sequels do with more infected, more explosions, global stakes, director Danny Boyle has a curveball for you. The long-awaited follow-up to his game-changing 2002 film 28 Days Later isn't trying to outdo the apocalypse. It's trying to understand what's left after it. Speaking to IGN, Boyle revealed that he and writer Alex Garland initially flirted with the typical sequel playbook. 'In fact, Alex wrote one script at one point, but they were kind of what you'd expect, and by that I mean things that you expect from a sequel, like the virus is weaponized by a military or a government or a shady [organization]... That kind of thing. And neither of us were very taken by it.' Instead of following the infection across continents in a World War Z -style expansion, Boyle and Garland made a sharp U-turn. They chose to pull the focus inward. 'We began to discuss this idea of doing a much bigger project, which was a series of films that sort of did the opposite of spreading it to Europe and the world.' This reflective approach lines up with what Boyle believes horror can do best by holding up a mirror. 'We turned back and looked at ourselves and we thought … it was very much like an England [type] film. So we kind of narrowed it down. We did the opposite of what you'd expect and it was because we had a lot to think about.' That "thinking" touches on the real-world fractures that have emerged in the years since 28 Days Later first hit theaters. Boyle mentions Brexit and the UK's shifting identity, hinting that this new chapter won't just be about rage-infected hordes, but about how a nation processes trauma. 'That's what you use these films for. They're not lectures or anything like that, but they do reflect, or there is a reflection in them, of where you are and what's happened to you really as individuals and as people." The sequel stars Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Ralph Fiennes, and centers on a group of survivors who've been living in relative isolation on a remote island. When they return to the mainland, they're confronted not just with the infected, but with the haunting question of what's changed, and what hasn't. If 28 Days Later redefined what a zombie film could be in the early 2000s, 28 Years Later is looking to flip the genre on its head once again, this time with an eerie calm and a deeper question at its core. 28 Years Later opens in theaters June 20, 2025.
Geek Tyrant
3 days ago
- Geek Tyrant
George R.R. Martin Weighs in on the ELDEN RING Movie: 'Alex Garland Is a First Rate Director' — GeekTyrant
In a recent blog post, the Game of Thrones creator and co-architect of Elden Ring 's vast mythology, George R.R. Martin, offered his thoughts on the upcoming film adaptation, and on its newly announced director, Alex Garland: 'Here's the latest about the ELDER RING [sic] movie that was announced a few days ago. A24 is a kickass studio, and Alex Garland is a first rate director.' That's all he shared directly. No big lore drops or story teases. But Martin's 'current mood' at the end of the post? Simply… 'hopeful.' As for how Martin fits into the Elden Ring picture, he didn't write the game, but he did lay the foundation. Back in 2022, he crafted the world's backstory, its mythic conflicts, and that heavy, dense sense of fallen grandeur. From there, Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki and the team at FromSoftware built the playable experience that we all hate to enjoy, one filled with cryptic NPCs, grotesque monsters, and just enough misery to keep you emotionally invested and spiritually broken. So far, all we know about the film is that it's coming from A24, and Alex Garland is directing. It's also reported that Kit Connor ( Heartstopper, Warfare ) may lead the dark fantasy epic. No story details have been shared, but I think it would be a samrt move to tell the story of Vyke the Dragonspear. It a really strong story, and if you're not familiar with it, you can read all about it here. It's the kind of tragic story arc is tailor-made for Garland's storytelling style. Martin also embedded a video from YouTuber Zayf the Scholar titled 'Why the Elden Ring Movie WON'T SUCK – Director Reveals His TRUE Power Level.' That doesn't technically confirm anything, but Martin is obviously vibing with the vision. You can watch that video below.
