For Callum Turner, the opportunity to portray a military man as part of what’s long been called The Greatest Generation – the men who fought the Nazi menace in World War II – was “a real honor.” At the same time, it was eye-opening to play a member of the 100th Bomb Group (the famed “Bloody Hundredth”) whose exploits are recounted in the nine-part, $250 million Apple TV+ wartime epic limited series “Masters of the Air.” As the real-life airman Major John “Bucky” Egan, Turner was thrust into the shoes and inside the head of a hero who survived the war but suffered severe emotional trauma while doing it. “I fell in love with (Egan),” he says, “because he’s got the biggest heart I’ve ever come across. At the beginning of his journey, he approaches the war with a naivete and an innocence, because he doesn’t realize the horrors of war and what’s about to hit him slam-bang in the face.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
What Egan had to endure has stuck with the man tasked with playing him. “I think the arc of his journey was a descent into madness, being volatile and using drink to straighten his canoe and try to balance himself,” the British-born Turner believes. “I’m sure I would do exactly the same as him. The question was: What happens to someone who witnesses their friends being blown up or ripped in half, or fall to the ground when their parachute doesn’t open, or their plane’s blown up? What happens to someone who feels the responsibility so deeply and can’t help what happens to someone who has to witness the horrors of war on one side.
“And then also,” Turner continues, “the thing that (Egan) is doing is dropping bombs on other people. So he knows he’s killing them. What happens to someone’s soul when they’re doing something as extreme as that? It felt almost Shakespearean to me in a way…I don’t know how these guys did it. They put themselves in the most extreme situations ever known to mankind, in warfare, and they did it over and over again…I think what I love about the show the most is that we don’t glorify anything. We definitely don’t glorify war. What these men did was extraordinary. They’re real-life superheroes as far as I’m concerned. I always felt it was important that we honored their reality and their journeys that they went through as human beings and the disaster that they felt inside of themselves and their souls disintegrating in front of their eyes.
It fascinated Turner to “find the human aspects of the free-fall that (these men) had to go through in order for us to have the liberties that we have today.”
Turner makes a point of emphasizing that he wasn’t in anything approaching top shape during production, which took place in 2021 at the height of the COVID pandemic. “I just lived like Egan,” he offers. “He drank a lot and I think the only exercise he got really was dancing.” So it was a shock to Turner’s system when he went from “Masters of the Air” to co-starring in the George Clooney-directed feature “The Boys on the Boat,” portraying a member of the University of Washington rowing team that competed at the 1936 Summer Olympics. “That was a big shift for sure,” he confirms. “We did two months of training before we even set foot on set.”
But back on “Masters,” much of the training there for Turner took place in a B-17 cockpit, which led to a kind of mini-competition between he and his co-stars on the project including Austin Butler, Barry Keoghan, Anthony Boyle and Nate Mann. They would be quizzed about what to do in certain real airborne emergencies “and you had to know it by heart,” he points out. “There’s 200 guys being extremely competitive with each other. No one wants to be the one who doesn’t know what to do.” There were also dance classes and etiquette lessons as well as voice coaches to help him keep an authentic American accent. Of the latter, he noted, “I would work on it for two or three hours a day, not only on the accent but imitating the off-kilter speaking style of Egan. It was a great challenge and a part of the job I really liked.”
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