For the era of sports drama. The boat boysBased on the true story of an underdog rowing team competing in the 1936 Olympics, star Callum Turner and his co-stars got into “incredible shape,” as Turner tells it. Consequence. In fact, the production schedule allowed the races featured in the George Clooney-directed film to be filmed chronologically, meaning that for the final sequence, Turner and the other actors could come close to mimicking the University of California's Olympic-level achievement. Washington Crew.
“The idea, which was great, of George and [producer Grant Heslov]”,” Turner says, “was that we weren't going to be that good at first. But if they give us two more months, we will be able to compete; obviously not as well as professional rowers, but we could try and at least look like we knew what we were doing.”
Turner, along with the seven other actors playing the rowing team, trained hard throughout production, and when they filmed the climactic Olympic race, they were able to match the reported pace of the original team… at least for a while. “The actual boat reached 46 strokes per minute, which was unprecedented in those old wooden boats, and they did it for about five minutes straight,” Turner says. “We did it for probably about a minute or 90 seconds.”
He Boys on the boat The cast may not have been able to beat the original rowing team in a head-to-head race, but even reaching that level is still a remarkable achievement, especially considering that, as Turner says, “none of us had ever set foot on a boat earlier in our lives.”
Turner adds: “It was a process of ups and downs. We are all individuals, but we are a ship. So sometimes I learned certain things faster than others and vice versa, but we were actually going in this direction and somehow… We don't even know how it happened. We thought, wow, we can do this. Hitting 46 strokes per minute in a sustainable manner, not just in short bursts, but over a sustained period of time, created a sense of euphoria knowing where we came from. “It was a beautiful moment.”
Turner's preparation for The boat boys extended far beyond simple rowing, as he played a real-life figure with a complex backstory. What helped Turner discover his understanding of Joe Rantz was “the pain that Joe had to go through when he was a child.” Rantz's entire childhood was traumatic, as Turner recounts, from “being put in an asylum to earn a living at age eight” to being abandoned by his father and stepmother at age 13.
thanks to our partners at consequence.net