Tom Francis spent his first month on The Mosquito Bowl learning two worlds at once. In a new interview with ELLE, the actor says the cast trained for three or four hours of football each morning, ate lunch, then spent another three or four hours on military preparation. The schedule helped him play Dave Schreiner, a University of Wisconsin football star who joined the Marines during World War II.
This is Francis’s first feature film after a career-changing stage run in Sunset Blvd. Watching American football up close became part of his homework: he and co-star Ray Nicholson visited New York Giants practice to see just how fast and agile top players move. On the film set in Australia, the demands went further, down to how a Marine of the period would carry a rifle.
More than a boot camp
The physical work also brought the four lead actors together. Francis told ELLE, “It was a month for us to be able to actually get to know each other.” The film depends on that bond. Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård, Nicholson and Francis play players whose plans for the future change after Pearl Harbor.
Francis plays Schreiner, a real player whose story is part of Buzz Bissinger’s book behind the film. The actor says he read about the men and looked at Schreiner’s letters while preparing. He recognized an overthinking streak in the man he was portraying, a small personal connection that helped him get beyond the uniform and the drills.
Peter Berg directs the Netflix film. His earlier Friday Night Lights work made Francis familiar with the football side before this role came along, but the war story asks something very different of the cast. Francis is careful in the interview not to compare a movie shoot with the actual experience of the Marines whose lives the story depicts.
His next turn is a comedy
The actor has already filmed a part in Season 2 of Benito Skinner’s Overcompensating, his first television comedy. The mood on that set could hardly be further from Berg’s war film. “I laughed constantly on that job,” Francis told ELLE, praising the ensemble around Skinner and Mary Beth Barone. A date for his episodes has not been established in the cited interview.
Francis is also attached to Apple TV’s limited series The Off Weeks. Asked about online James Bond rumors, he praised director Denis Villeneuve but did not confirm an audition or a role. It is tempting to turn every rising actor’s next interview into a franchise prediction. His actual work is more interesting right now: a first film built around a real life and a comedy that lets him show a different side.
The Mosquito Bowl opens in select theaters October 30 and arrives on Netflix November 25, according to Netflix’s first-look announcement.
