If Kit Connor's Warfare castmates hadn't already nicknamed him "Baby Face," they could call him "Hype Man.""Ohhhhh, stud!" he yells out to Joseph Qu
If Kit Connor’s Warfare castmates hadn’t already nicknamed him “Baby Face,” they could call him “Hype Man.”
“Ohhhhh, stud!” he yells out to Joseph Quinn, encouraging the Stranger Things alum as he poses for the camera at Entertainment Weekly’s cover shoot two weeks ago in Hollywood. “Too good. Give us a chance!” he shouts to Charles Melton, before cheekily giving Will Poulter a “woof” when it’s his turn.
The cast, especially D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, is in a lively mood, dancing and singing along to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” and Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day,” among the many songs blasting through the soundstage. Their camaraderie is obvious, laughing and chumming it up between takes — Connor and Poulter playfully tease Melton as he quickly does a wardrobe change on set: “For God’s sake, keep your shirt on!”
They’re able to let loose now, but that comes in stark contrast to the two-plus months they spent last year training for and filming A24’s up-to-date film (in theaters April 11), co-directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza. The movie marks the directorial debut of the latter, an Iraq War veteran and former member of the Navy’s SEAL Team 5 who has worked as a technical and military advisor for more than a decade on projects including Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor and Garland’s 2024 hit, Civil War.
Mendoza lived his movie, which takes place on Nov. 19, 2006, when a surveillance mission by his platoon of Navy SEALs in Ramadi turned into a fight for their lives. Outside of the opening scene — depicting a time-honored start to their day: crowding around a TV and jamming along to an aerobics-class-inspired music video for Erik Prydz’s “Call on Me” — the movie, based on the SEALs’ memories, unfolds in real time. After quietly taking over a split-level house in the middle of the night and herding its terrified occupants into a bedroom, the team used their position to scope out a neighborhood market. But when the streets ominously clear out and their sniper is spotted, they’re forced to engage in a fierce battle with al-Qaeda insurgents.
“The initial idea was simply to make an ultra-realistic, forensically accurate movie about combat,” Garland explains from a hotel room sofa in Washington, D.C., next to Mendoza, who has nearly lost his voice after a run of screenings around the country for the military, veterans, and their families. “But I had no idea what the combat was. And Ray had this story he wanted to tell. There are many stories he has that he wanted to tell, but this was the one that was utmost in his mind.”
Namely, because his best friend, fellow SEAL Elliott Miller — the unit’s head sniper and medic — doesn’t remember the attack because of the severe injuries, both physical and mental, he suffered that day. Mendoza, played by Reservation Dogs’ Woon-A-Tai, hoped Warfare would support Miller, portrayed by Shōgun’s Cosmo Jarvis, understand what happened to him and the other SEALs.
The grand gesture, Miller tells EW via email (he communicates through an iPad), makes him feel “loved” but also that he “will always have a family in the teammates I used to serve with!!”
“This project is bigger than us. The story’s bigger than us,” Melton says. “There’s all these great things — great studio, great filmmakers, great script, this and that — but at the end of the day, it was for Ray, for Elliott. I know all the guys would be okay with me saying this: We all became better for it.”
But getting there also presented a unique challenge for everyone, even Garland, an experienced director with four previous feature films and the eight-episode Hulu series Devs to his credit. “When I first sat down, conceptualized this, discussed it with Ray, I was imagining we would, in a strange way, recreate reality. What one quickly realizes is that you can’t,” he explains, citing their lack of an exact record or timeline of the events. “What we did have was memory — we had Ray’s memory, and we had the memories of other people involved in this incident.”
‘Warfare’ stars Kit Connor, Charles Melton, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, and Joseph Quinn photographed exclusively for EW.
Eric Ray Davidson
Garland and Mendoza spoke with every member of the platoon they could find to reconstruct the almost 90 minutes of action depicted in Warfare. (The names of 14 of the 20 men have been changed since some are still on vigorous duty, while others didn’t want to be identified or filmmakers weren’t able to contact them.) The compact problem, they found, was that “sometimes those memories would clash with each other. Someone would say, ‘I did this,’ and someone else would say, in effect, ‘No, I did that.’ And then we’d have to figure out what the truth was as best we could,” the Ex Machina and Annihilation filmmaker recalls. During the editing process, they decided to add the caption, “This film is based only on the memories of people that were there.” Garland says, “It felt like the truest statement we could make about the film as we had made it. If we’d said ‘a true story,’ that would be slightly disingenuous.”
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Accuracy is of utmost importance for Mendoza, who’s keenly aware of the detail required to make a military-based film. Since Warfare takes place in 2006, there were practical challenges, like sourcing equipment that would’ve been used at the time. But the actors also had to understand every aspect of what it means to be a SEAL and learn how to work as a unit, from how they move to how they speak and everything in between. So the cast — also including Noah Centineo, Michael Gandolfini, Finn Bennett, Evan Holtzman, Adain Bradley, Taylor John Smith, and Henrique Zaga — went through a three-and-a-half week boot camp designed to get them Warfare-ready. The most essential things Mendoza wanted them to learn? Safety and brotherhood.
“I didn’t need them to talk like my friends. I didn’t need them to necessarily act like them,” Mendoza says, “but I wanted them to capture the essence and the spirit, because they all did extremely brave things, and I needed them to be able to express that.”
Will Poulter photographed exclusively for EW.
Eric Ray Davidson
Poulter describes the boot camp as a “condensed and far more manageable, easier version,” of the time-honored SEALs program known as BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training). Still, it was an “incredibly trying” experience.
“They have an expression in the SEAL team: They don’t say ‘Practice makes perfect,’ they say, ‘Perfect practice makes perfect,'” the actor explains. “You can practice something a million times, but if you’re practicing it wrong, it’s not going to result in anything close to perfection. Holding ourselves to higher standards than maybe any of us ever held ourselves to before was really tough.”
Woon-A-Tai recalls watching a documentary about BUD/S on YouTube and being “f—ing grateful I’m not a real soldier.”
“When I meet these Navy SEALs, I was like, ‘Oh, wow, you f—ing beat BUD/S. That’s crazy. You must be a beast,'” the Toronto native says in admiration and awe. “They have to do underwater training, holding your breath, f—ing mimicking waterboarding. You have to have a f—ing strong spirit and a big heart because, damn, that’s hard. And a lot of people break. Those like Ray who don’t are one in a million.”
D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai photographed exclusively for EW.
Eric Ray Davidson
That grueling boot camp also included a BUD/S trainee tradition: shaving each other’s heads. “It’s a symbolic expression of this decision that we are all starting at ground zero,” explains Melton, a “military kid” who lived in eight different places before he was 18, traveling the world with his dad who was in the U.S. Army for 24 years. (He was serving in the Gulf War when Charles was born, and was deployed to Iraq when the family was stationed in Germany.) “We are all in this together.”
He continues, “On the hard days, you know you’re not alone, and the other guys are with you. It holds you accountable in a way. Yeah, these are long days, some of these days are tough, but I’m doing this with these guys [in service of this] story.… There is an elimination of any sort of ego in all of it.”
Training also included rehearsals, where Quinn says Garland would block out the action like a stage play. “We were able to get this very frantic, kinetic feeling of it happening in real time,” the star of the upcoming The Fantastic Four: First Steps explains. “There are so many clichés that have been thrown around in cinematic journalism about ‘it’s really happening in front of you’ or whatever. But I think that was the incentive and the bullseye that we were trying to hit for it to feel real. I know that might sound arbitrary, but we were all [in one contained set] the whole f—ing time, which was a very rare experience.”
Joseph Quinn photographed exclusively for EW.
Eric Ray Davidson
It’s also not common for actors to live together for the duration of pre-production and filming, but most of the Warfare cast did exactly that. Mendoza says housing them in the same hotel was more of a logistical decision than intentional, given the film’s rural filming location in Hertfordshire, the county north of London. Still, it fostered a bonding experience they likely would not have had otherwise.
While Poulter had a similar hotel experience with his Maze Runner costars, he says this was “slightly different, only in the sense that we were all trying to operate as a kind of military unit on and off set. So there wasn’t really splinter groups or cliques or anything like that. We all worked out together, we all ate together, we all socialized together, we all went on smoke breaks at the same time, we all had coffee at the same time. We really tried to do things as uniformly as possible.”
This project is bigger than us. The story’s bigger than us.”
—Charles Melton
“It left no room for any kind of privacy or anything like that, but it really was for the best,” Connor says. “We felt like we all had each other’s backs. We were all going to help each other through anything hard that came our way. So it was a real blessing, I think. I dunno how I would’ve done that job if I wasn’t living in that hotel with them.”
Mendoza recalls giving a speech at the start of production urging his cast to “enjoy this because it’s going to end — and when it does, you’re going to miss it.”
“I was jealous because I knew what they were about to go through. I could see it happening. And really, when we started filming is when I really started to see this kind of weird transformation,” the co-director shares. Even when they weren’t on camera, they were there supporting [each other]. They just started f—ing joking around, singing songs and doing quartets, falling asleep on each other by accident. They were always there. They never left the set even when they weren’t on camera.”
Kit Connor photographed exclusively for EW.
Eric Ray Davidson
Given their leadership roles in the film — Melton and Poulter as commanding officers and Quinn as a petty officer — Mendoza communicated daily instructions to the trio, who then relayed that information to the rest of the cast. The three even bought watches for everyone to ensure they were “always on time,” Melton says. “We were in it, locked in.”
In the midst of their training, the cast gave Poulter the nickname “Daddy” (“I was resistant to it originally and then it grew on me, and I’m very honored that they called me that in the end,” he says, laughing); while bowling one weekend, Quinn was tagged as “Funcle” (“It never stuck — no one was calling me that on set,” he insists); Taylor John Smith was dubbed “Lamb Bone”; Woon-A-Tai had a few, including Mendoza’s nickname, “Baby Ray,” but eventually landed on “DP” and “Doza”; and Melton borrowed his dad’s Army moniker, “Top,” after initially being called “Romeo.”
Jarvis, who took on Miller’s nickname “Booger,” found that boot camp was not only “absolutely necessary” but also “effortlessly relevant” to their workflow. “We were building familiarities with each other that we brought into the work,” he says. “So by the time a scene is being conducted, just as the people we are portraying, you can feel them even if you’re not looking at them.”
That trust was especially essential when filming the aftermath of a grenade attack followed by an IED explosion that killed the platoon’s two Iraqi scouts, concussed several others, and severely injured Quinn’s Sam and Jarvis’ Elliott.
While Jarvis spends a portion of the movie unconscious, Quinn’s character is alert and aware of the extreme injuries to his legs — screaming in unimaginable agony as Gandolfini’s Lt. Macdonald and Ray apply a tourniquet and administer morphine. Garland and Mendoza don’t shy away from showing the physical horrors of the attack.
“It was pretty much all practical,” Quinn says of Garland’s commitment to creating “visceral moments” in his movies, here with the expertise of the co-director’s longtime collaborator, prosthetics designer Tristan Versluis. “There’s some moments in the film where it’s quite exposing, and there’s a lot of blood.”
In the blink of an eye, the team’s mission shifts from surveillance to survival. Writing the scene from memory didn’t bother Mendoza much, but filming the sequence, he says, “was difficult,” especially as he watched Woon-A-Tai recover Elliott’s body from the street, bullets whizzing by them.
“When D’Pharaoh is pulling Cosmo up the driveway, that triggered a lot of emotions,” Mendoza admits. “But it was a form of therapy for me in a lot of ways. There’s things that I had pushed down and tucked away. I just didn’t have the tools to deal with that.”
D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and co-director Ray Mendoza on the set of ‘Warfare’.
Murray Close/A24
The fact that the real Elliott was on set added a whole other layer to the proceedings.
“It pulled on that nerve, that heartstring,” Mendoza recalls. “Elliott started to cry, and then I had to go off set because I didn’t want the actors to see me crying. So I called cut, ran off set, and I cried for a good 10 minutes. And at that point, Alex had to take over the rest of the day.”
Woon-A-Tai says that day “hit different” for him. While Elliott’s presence on set changed the “dynamic of the atmosphere,” the actor tried not to “interfere with the truth” or add his own “acting magic.” Instead, he strove to stay true to what the SEALs experienced — including Mendoza’s forthright account of how he froze upon discovering his friend, who he presumed was dead, amid the stout smoke after the explosion.
“That was extremely exhausting, and it was very tiring. I was gagging in between takes because of the smoke, and I wanted to throw up,” Woon-A-Tai recalls of dragging Jarvis into the house. “But lemme tell you, it never compares to what Ray felt in that exact real moment and the exhaustion he must have had carrying the real Elliott — who was a lot bigger than Cosmo Jarvis, who had real military gear on. Plus, Ray [wearing his] hundred-pound radio backpack and carrying him through the streets while actively getting shot at.”
The man Quinn plays, Joe Hildebrand (renamed Sam for the film), also visited the set. Quinn recalls the sensitivity exercised on those days, but also how essential it was to decompress.
“You are very aware of the real-life consequences that these men live with as a result of the events that happened this afternoon that takes place in the film,” he says. “It was sobering. It was an intense environment, obviously, but I think levity and brevity — and dick jokes, basically — was the stuff that was able to cut through it because, whilst it’s an incredibly impossibly intense situation to comprehend in a civilian context, if we were too bogged down in the severity of it, the air would be quite thick, especially because the film is contained in that house. It was very necessary to try and have a laugh as much as possible.”
(Clockwise from top left) D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and Joseph Quinn.
Eric Ray Davidson
Garland and Mendoza decided to recreate that house, as well as the surrounding neighborhood and street, on an abandoned World War II airfield frequently used by U.K. productions rather than film somewhere in the Middle East, North Africa, or America, all locations they considered. In addition to the memories of those who were there — as well as contemporary maps and “the magic of Google Earth,” Garland says — they also had the firsthand accounts of other non-American military sources, as well as “some photographs of the house directly after this action had taken place.”
“We had some documentary evidence that the sniper hole was here on that wall, the color of the curtains was this, this room looked like that, this bloodstain looked like that,” Garland adds. “We had something very concrete to build from.”
The story is one of many Mendoza feels “an obligation” to tell — the Battles of Fallujah and Haditha Dam among them — to help the veteran community that he says has “helped me get where I am.” That extends to their families, who have had emotional reactions to the film at advance screenings.
“I spoke with the wife of a Marine last night who I think was just overwhelmed with emotion because, for a long time, I think her husband was trying to explain it, but in a very similar way with how I was, I couldn’t. When she saw it, I think she finally understood what he was trying to explain,” Mendoza shares. “That has been probably the most impactful thing I’ve heard so far. I don’t know what their marriage is like, but I can tell by their emotion that it’s something they’ve probably been struggling with for a long time.”
As for showing the movie for the first time to Miller and his fellow SEAL Team 5 members, Mendoza admits he was “nervous about what the guys would think because their approval and opinion is what matters the most to me… Elliott said he liked it, but [he] doesn’t remember what happened, so I think it was comforting for him to hear from all the other guys that it was about as accurate as we can get it because the film is about as complete of a memory he is going to have, and I think he was extremely grateful for that.”
Charles Melton photographed exclusively for EW.
Eric Ray Davidson
Melton admits Warfare has impacted his relationship with his veteran dad, not just from being part of the film but also watching it with him. “I was pretty shook, to be honest. I didn’t know what to expect,” he says of seeing a final cut for the first time. “The hug that I shared with my father afterward is something that I’m never going to forget, and the words that he told me is something that I’m never going to forget. The first thing that he said in [his] letter to me: ‘Charles, thank you.'”
For the actors, this movie isn’t just another title on their list of growing credits; it’s one they collectively feel proud to have been a part of — and it’s one they’ll never forget. In fact, the actors have a indefinite reminder of their experience in the form of a group tattoo that all of them now have on various parts of their bodies, all with the same message: “Call on Me.”
Kit Connor shows off his ‘Call on Me’ tattoo.
Eric Ray Davidson
“It had a lot of meaning to a lot of the guys who were there that day,” Woon-A-Tai says. “And we found meaning within ourselves, and we found meaning with that title too.”
—————–
Directed by Kristen Harding + Alison Wild
Photography by Eric Ray Davidson
Motion – DP: Kayla Hoff; 1st AC: Jacob Laureanti; Steadicam Op: Luke Rihl; Gaffer: Taylor Huddleson; Best Electric: Ben Perez; Grip: Spenser Adelstein; Best Grip: Jonathan “JP” Portillo; Swing: Maile Edwards
Production Design – Production Designer: Allison Freeman; Assistants: Brian Riedel, Chris Stewart
Styling – Stylist: Ilaria Urbinati/The Wall Group; Assistants: Megan Lackey, Rajina Dusara, Jenna Filingeri, Savannah Mendoza
Photo – 1st Assistant: Jack Shelton; 2nd Assistant: Justin Dunn; Digital Tech: Jules Bates
Post-Production – Color Correction: Nate Seymour/TRAFIK; Design: Alice Morgan; VFX: James Kowalski; Sound Design: Morgan Sanguedolce
Video Interview – Director/Producer: Salem Daniel; DP: Briana Monet; Cam Op/Key Grip: Myles Channing; Cam Op/1st AC: Keitumetse Mokhonwana; Gaffer: Tam Lam; Audio: Paul Mason
Will Poulter – Grooming: KC Fee/Redefine Representation; (Header Look) Jacket: Buck Mason; T-Shirt: Billy Reid; Pants: Acne; Boots: Blundstone (Cover Look) Jacket: Tod’s; T-Shirt: Elwood; Jeans: Levi’s; Boots: Dr. Martens
Charles Melton – Grooming: Candice Birns/A-Frame Agency; (Header Look) Polo: Bode; Pants: Reiss; Shoes: John Lobb; Watch: Omega; Jewelry: Talent’s Own (Cover Look) Jacket: Tony Wack; T-Shirt: Cotton Citizen; Pants: Talent’s Own; Shoes: Harry’s London; Watch: Omega; Jewelry: Talent’s Own
Joseph Quinn – Grooming: Johnnie Sapong/The Wall Group; (Header Look) Jacket: Officine Generale; T-Shirt: BDXY; Pants: Basic Rights; Boots: Dr. Martens (Cover Look) Jacket: Tony Wack; T-Shirt; BDXY; Jeans: Lee; Belt: Buck Mason; Boots: Dr. Martens
Kit Connor – Grooming: Coco Ullrich/A-Frame Agency; (Header Look): Polo: Vintage; Pants: Alex Mill; Belt: Good Fellow; Shoes: Acne; Watch: IWC; Ring: David Yurman (Cover Look) Jacker: Vintage; Tank: Todd Snyder; Pants: Alex Mill; Belt: Good Fellow; Boots: Frye
D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai – Grooming: Sallie Hotch; (Header Look ) Jacket: Tony Wack; Tank: Vintage; Pants: Giuliva Heritage; Boots: Kurt Geiger; Watch: IWC; Chain: David Yurman (Cover Look) Jacket: Billy Reid; Tank: Vintage; Pants: Rowing Blazers; Belt: ISTO; Shoes: Aquatalia; Watch: Omega; Chain: David Yurman
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