Masters of the Air is a companion series to Band of Brothers and The Pacific. The show follows the 100th Bomb Group in the Eighth Air Force nicknamed the Bloody Hundreth. This unit faced unrelenting German fighters and incurred heavy losses during the war, becoming an unforgettable part of the war’s history.
Masters of the Air was created by John Shiban and John Orloff based on Donal Miller’s book, Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany. The series is executive produced by Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg. Masters of the Air stars Austin Butler, Callum Turner, Anthony Boyle, Barry Keoghan, Nikolai Kinski, Stephen Campbell Moore, Sawyer Spielberg, and Isabel May.
10 Shows The Band Of Brothers Team Can Do After Masters Of The Air
The team behind Band of Brothers have plenty of engaging wartime stories to tell after Masters of the Air, with plenty of options on the table.
Screen Rant interviewed Masters of the Air stars Nate Mann and Anthony Boyle. They discuss the training process and shooting scenes in the cockpits to bring authenticity to the series. They also share insight into each of their characters and preserving the history of the fighter pilots.
Nate Mann & Anthony Boyle Talk Masters of The Air
Screen Rant: This show is absolutely incredible. It makes you feel like you’re right there in the cockpit with a lot of these pilots, and it does a great job of preserving the history of these missions that these men flew on. Can you tell me a little bit about your character’s navigator, Harry Crosby, and one of the best pilots in the 100th, Major Robert Rosie Rosenthal?
Anthony Boyle: Yeah. Well, when we first meet Crosby, he’s trying to fight the Nazis, but he’s also fighting uncontrollable air sickness, so there’s two battles going on here for Crosby at the beginning, and we really go on a real hero’s journey with him.
Nate Mann: Yeah, we meet Rosie. Rosie grew up in Brooklyn and became a lawyer. Pearl Harbor happens, he enlists right then and there and joins the war effort, spends months and months back home before he sees action behind the cockpit training gunners. So by the time he arrives, he’s amassed a lot of experience, but he doesn’t quite yet know that some of his first missions are going to be some of the most devastating in the whole 100’s history.
Anthony, this show does a great job of capturing the realism these men faced in the sky. Can you talk about shooting these scenes in the cockpit and what was added for the realism?
Anthony Boyle: Well, look, we were in these replica B-17s, and we went up 50 feet on these hydraulic gimbals, and all around us there was 360 degree screens, so it wasn’t like you would normally have green screen or whatever, and you were having to imagine the planes. They were actually computer programmed that when we would turn, the Messerschmitts would fly at us. Whenever we would be shot at, the plane would shake.
There was 250 people on these laptops in the corner typing in all this code. It was like Minority Report. It was just this crazy setup that really added to the reality of what these men were facing. We tried to get as close to this as possible. Obviously, we can never speak about what that was like. We’re just actors, but we tried to get as close as possible, and I feel like we’ve represented it well enough on screen.
There’s this authenticity you guys brought to these roles, and I’m sure the training kind of helped with that. Nate, can you talk about the training you did for the show and how that helped build the bonds between you and your fellow castmates?
Nate Mann: Yeah. We worked with a military advisor called Dale Dye, who’s kind of a legend. He worked on Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers and The Pacific, and we had heard stories about the boot camps on those projects with obviously stories about infantry. What made this unique wasn’t just we were marching in step and learning the rank and file and the order of life on the base in the military, but also we had to spend time with these machines in these cockpits talking to people who’ve actually flown them so that when it came time to shoot, we knew where to look.
We knew which switches to flip. We knew how these maps worked, what the role of a bombardier was, all to give it this sense of cohesion that’s so important to Steven Spielberg and to Tom Hanks and to Gary Goetzman who put this together is to try and cover every aspect of it and make it feel as authentic as possible.
Anthony, a lot of these stories are real. Can you talk about the responsibility of telling these stories and honoring these men through this show?
Anthony Boyle: It’s interesting. I feel like for me, whenever I’m playing someone, a real person, or whenever I think about the responsibility or anything, it feels like too heavy a weight, too great a weight on your shoulders, and I think to try and get rid of all that noise, the best way you can actually serve the text and actually serve the person you’re playing is to just focus on the minutiae of their life. To just think about what it was like for them day to day, when they woke up, what did they eat, what was their first thought, what did they dream about the night before?
When you get into that sort of stuff, I think then it becomes easier, but. I try to quieten down all that noise, but the other day we met some veterans who served in that war, and we watched the show with them. We’d done a screening with them, and to shake those men’s hands and to look in their eyes, it really, really made an impact on me. It really brought it back to what we had done. I just can’t wait for people to see the show.
Nate, the technology that these men used at the time was pretty new. They were flying blind, and 77% of these men went down. Can you talk about how this show preserved the history of air combat and the mission that these men flew?
Nate Mann: Yeah. I think one of the things that was surprising about beginning to work on it was we think of these machines as pretty antiquated from today’s standpoint, but at the time, they were state of the art and learning about them and how they worked was kind of an impressive aspect of it. And then when we were beginning to understand in some of these first missions where they’re really grappling with it’s minus 40 degrees outside, you’re at 25,000 feet, there’s limited oxygen.
There’s so many things, the margin between life and death is so slim, and they were really learning on the fly how to cope with it and the strategies they were going to use, all by the way, meanwhile, in the midst of trying to deliver a payload against an enemy. So it was essential for us to try and step in those shoes, not only to understand the workings of the machine, but the conditions and trying to stay focused through all of that.
In the show, we have nicknames like Bucky, Buck, Rosie, and Bubbles. Did you guys have any nicknames for each other when you guys were going through your training at all?
Nate Mann: When it started, we had done this boot camp. We were all calling each other by our character names anyway, from boot camps, so there was also, I met Anto and he was Cros to me. You know what I mean? We shot for a year on this, so it feels so embedded in that way.
Anthony Boyle: But off set, Nate likes to be called Big Papa.
Nate Mann: Yeah. At all times.
Anthony Boyle: Going forward, if you’d please.
There you go. What did you learn about yourself through this experience and playing this character?
Anthony Boyle: I don’t think I learned anything about myself, but I learned a lot about Crosby. I learned a lot about him, and I learned just how incredible he was as a human being, and what a joy, what an honor it was to play him.
Nate Mann: Yeah. I think when I was asking myself how I would’ve fared under these kinds of extraordinary circumstances, the courage and the sacrifice of these men, of my character in particular, just astonished me, and I remain astonished by those feats still to this day.
About Masters of The Air
From Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman—the producers of Band of Brothers and The Pacific. During World War II, airmen risk their lives with the 100th Bomb Group, a brotherhood forged by courage, loss, and triumph.
Check back soon for our other Masters of Air interview with Austin Butler and Callum Turner.
Masters of the Air
Masters of the Air is an Apple TV+ original war drama starring Austin Butler, Callum Turner, Anthony Boyle, and Barry Keoghan. The series follows a group of eleven World War II pilots who fight German fighters in a bomber called “The Flying Fortress.” The miniseries was created by John Shiban and John Orloff and based on the book Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany by Donald L. Miller.
- Release Date
- January 26, 2024
- Cast
- Austin Butler , Callum Turner , Barry Keoghan , Nikolai Kinski , Stephen Campbell Moore , Sawyer Spielberg , Isabel May , Anthony Boyle
- Seasons
- 1
- Creator(s)
- John Shiban , John Orloff
- Writers
- John Shiban , John Orloff
- Directors
- Cary Joji Fukunaga , Dee Rees , Anna Boden , Ryan Fleck , Timothy Van Patten
- Where To Watch
- Apple TV+
