What does it take to get cast in a Peter Berg war movie? For Ray Nicholson, it was a two-page handwritten letter. For Nicholas Galitzine, it was a rom-com with Anne Hathaway that Berg couldn’t stop watching.
Berg shared those stories during an FYC panel for The Mosquito Bowl, his Netflix drama about four college football stars who enlisted in the Marines after Pearl Harbor. Jennifer Garner moderated the conversation, which also featured Bill Skarsgård, Tom Francis, and sound designer Wylie Stateman. Gold Derby is exclusively debuting the full video below.
Berg said Nicholson won him over with “this beautiful handwritten letter — two pages, beautifully written — really just kind of exposing his heart to me and his honesty.” Nicholson wrote it during the Los Angeles fires. “I was watching my childhood burn down,” he said. “I didn’t quite know what the script was about yet, but there was something about the story that deeply touched me… I told him, ‘I will give you 100% of my heart and soul. I will give you everything.’ And probably sometimes more than he would’ve liked.”
As for Galitzine, Berg said what did it for him was “this rom-com where he played a boy band, sexy kind of guy with Anne Hathaway,” referring to The Idea of You. “If you know me, that’s not necessarily first up on my list. I started watching it and I couldn’t stop. I’m like, ‘What is happening here? This guy is pulling this off for me.'”
Berg found Francis after his girlfriend took him to see Sunset Boulevard on Broadway. “She was sort of beaming, and Margot Robbie was actually in the theater in front of us beaming at him,” he said. “And I fell in love with him that night watching him.”
Before filming, Skarsgård traveled to Okinawa and visited the area where his character’s real-life counterpart was killed. Today it’s a residential area with a playground and a convenience store. “I just stood there, and it really kind of shook me to the core,” he said. “What we’re doing is make-believe. We’re trying to make an illusion of real events, but standing there, something felt so immensely real.”
The cast did nearly all of their own stunts. “Ray is literally missing a piece of his knee because of Pete over here,” Galitzine said. “Ray got set on fire as well.”
“I caught on fire briefly. Briefly,” Nicholson said. His favorite moment came during the title game, when Berg told the actors to just play and handed him a Santa hat. “He looks at me and he just goes, ‘You know what to do with this,'” Nicholson said. “I was acting like an absolute maniac, and I was just like, ‘Screw it, I’m going to hit him really hard.’ I ended up with a bloody lip, and we just went with it. I could see him looking in the monitor just smiling, and I have this Santa hat on. It’s the best.”
To close the panel, Berg made clear where he stands on the film’s message. “Some people have asked me whether this was a pro-war film or an anti-war film, and my answer is I don’t know how a sensible human being could make a pro-war film,” he said. “This is definitely an anti-war film. I do not like war. I have tremendous respect and understanding of why we do need to have an active military. But I believe, moreover, that we need to hold ourselves and our leaders responsible and accountable for the decisions that lead to young men and women going into war.”
The Mosquito Bowl is in select theaters now and streams on Netflix Nov. 25.
