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."

Building a brotherhood

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."

Truthful portrayals

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.