Casting the young men at the center of The Mosquito Bowl wasn’t just about finding actors who looked like the real-life Marines they would portray.
Director Peter Berg’s World War II drama follows college football stars John McLaughry, Bob Bauman, Tony Butkovich, and Dave Schreiner from the height of their sports careers through Marine training and into the Pacific theater. The actors playing them had to make that transformation feel visceral and real — first capturing the hope of shining futures as they dominated athletic fields in the 1940s, then gradually shedding that youthful confidence as war changed them.
“Physical resemblance is an important piece, but what we were really looking for were actors who felt fearless and were willing to lose themselves fully in the story, and to immerse themselves in the way Pete shoots,” casting director Rachel Tenner tells Tudum. “When an actor has that quality, there’s no vanity. They’re able to disappear into the role.”
Before filming, the actors spent weeks together rigorously learning Marine and football fundamentals. And once cameras began rolling, Berg made a bold choice: He shot much of The Mosquito Bowl chronologically, which is uncommon in feature filmmaking. The cast experienced the story in roughly the same order their characters did — meeting one another as teammates and rivals, training as Marines, enduring the film’s punishing combat sequences, briefly returning to the game they loved in an impromptu football catchup, later known as the titular Mosquito Bowl; and ultimately arriving at the Battle of Okinawa.
“It’s rare, but it’s great when you can do that,” Bill Skarsgård, who plays Bob Bauman, says. “The guys go through such big changes throughout the story, so shooting in order is very informative. We got to discover the characters a little bit as we went, too.”
Here are the actors who portrayed the key players in The Mosquito Bowl, in theaters now and on Netflix Nov. 25.
Buzz Bissinger, whose nonfiction book inspired the film, came to see the real John McLaughry as a Renaissance man. The son of a celebrated college football coach, McLaughry was a talented Brown University athlete who lived partly in his father’s shadow. He was also a painter, and his family preserved an extensive collection of his correspondence — even letters he had written as a small child.
“He was really the steady force,” Bissinger says. “I think he was the one you looked up to. He wasn’t a hot dog. He was a great leader because he listened and he did not take unnecessary risks.”
Nicholas Galitzine says he initially understood McLaughry as someone who believed he could handle whatever was put in front of him — but the war shook him to his core.
“I went through quite a journey personally, very much like John McLaughry — a well-educated man who thinks he’s got the world figured out,” Galitzine says. “Then his whole worldview starts to deteriorate once he’s actually there; he has to go through a kind of rebirth, learning what he can and can’t control, humbling himself, trusting the process.”
As the physical demands of the shoot grew tougher, the actors also carried traces of the journey with them. Galitzine recalls filming beach combat with dirt beneath his eyelids, cuts on his arms and legs, and a battered back and ankles from earlier football sequences.
But keeping the real McLaughry and his fellow Marines in mind put his experience in perspective. “You think, ‘I’m exhausted, I’ve got dirt in my eyes, my back hurts — but it was so much worse for them, so I’ll just keep going,’” Galitzine says.
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Bissinger describes University of Wisconsin star tackle Bob Bauman as “more devil-may-care” than many of his teammates, someone who looked after others, including his friend Dave Schreiner (Tom Francis), while encouraging them not to take everything so seriously.
For Skarsgård, understanding Bauman required confronting the enormity of the lived experience of war. “I read memoirs and watched documentaries and interviews about what actually happened to these men,” the actor says. He also traveled to Okinawa and visited the real locations associated with the battle. “It was a gnarly shoot, but nothing compared to what we were portraying, of course,” Skarsgard says. “I feel like such a lightweight next to what these men actually went through.”
And because the film was made largely in sequence, the end of Bauman’s story also arrived near the end of Skarsgård’s own months-long experience playing him.
“I think we all felt a collective resistance to ending these individual stories, Pete included,” Skarsgård says. “I’ll miss Bob Bauman.”
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Purdue University fullback Tony Butkovich was the kind of player whose name sounded destined for football glory. “You’ve got to be a star football player if your name is Tony Butkovich,” Bissinger jokes. “He was just a big kid and a great football player. He was tough.”
Butkovich grew up in a family of seven children, all first-generation Americans, three of whom attended college. Unlike some of the other men Bissinger researched, he left behind little correspondence, making his personality more of a challenge to research decades later.
Nicholson nevertheless found an unexpected way into the character when Purdue sent him restored footage of the real Butkovich running on the football field. It arrived, coincidentally, on the anniversary of Butkovich’s death. “I watched it alone in my house, in the dark, and felt like I was in communion with him somehow,” Nicholson says.
The production gave the actor other physical ways into the role. A former high school football player himself, Nicholson trained to reproduce the movement of a 1940s running back, while the film’s practical battlefields put him amid real fire, smoke, tanks, mud, and explosions. “I’m going to do a better job acting next to a real fire in a real tank than I would in front of a green screen,” he says, “and hopefully that shows.”
For Nicholson, living with Butkovich’s story put the soldier’s sacrifice in perspective. “With these characters, you’re playing a year or two of their life, but you realize you’re carrying their whole lifespan with you,” Nicholson says.
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Dave Schreiner was already a celebrated athlete before he went to war as an All-American at the University of Wisconsin. But the letters Bissinger discovered revealed a young man with a well of vulnerability beneath the confidence he displayed on the athletic fields.
Schreiner’s words — along with correspondence from his fiancée, Odette Hendrickson — became some of Bissinger’s most valuable sources for understanding the man. “I saw an incredible humility in him,” the author says. “He was really, really hard on himself and almost shy.”
The Mosquito Bowl is one of the first film appearances for Tom Francis, who’s best known for his breakout role onstage as Joe Gillis in the Broadway and West End runs of Sunset Boulevard. The English actor felt the camaraderie among the cast and crew, much as the soldiers and players must have in real life. “The best five months of my life,” Francis says. “I’ve met people on this job I’ll hold on to for the rest of my life. We came into this movie as boys and left as men.”
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In his screen debut, Broadway star Brent Comer plays fellow Marine and Mosquito Bowl participant George Murphy, captain of Notre Dame, who engages in sporting rivalry with members of the core four. “He’s a nasty smack talker, but he cares and he loves hard,” says Comer of his character. “What I love about the character, and what's true of the person, is that he put others before himself, both in real life and in the [film]. That's the beauty of his character. He's this golden, bigger-than-life personality who seems to have everything and has a good head on his shoulders.”
Because the film was shot chronologically, Comer arrived on set after Galitizine, Skarsgard, Nicholson, and Francis were already “thick as thieves,” but he quickly bonded with his costars, although there was one he’d already met through shared experiences in musical theater. “I met Tom while we were performing a block away from each other in New York,” recalls Comer. “It was special to see how he made such an incredible adjustment from stage to screen.”
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Nicholas Galitzine as John McLaughry and Ella Newton as Jane (right)
Australian actor Ella Newton portrays John McLaughry’s girlfriend Jane, the love of his young life. As war takes John far from home, Jane becomes the future he hopes to return to.
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Lola Bond plays Odette Hendrickson, Dave Schreiner’s fiancée who suffered no fools and wasn’t blinded by his college stardom.
Schreiner’s own letters had been preserved at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and Bissinger was also able to locate letters written by Hendrickson. Those documents became part of what Bissinger calls the “detective story” of reporting the book: finding scraps of personal history that could restore the interior lives of young people who could no longer speak for themselves. Before Schreiner shipped off to war, he and Hendrickson shared bright dreams for the future.
“The letters are great because they’re poignant,” Bissinger says. “They’re simple. You get the idea of these men just pining for home.”
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Berg himself plays General Simon Buckner, the real military commander depicted during the Battle of Okinawa.
The role has a personal connection to Berg’s research. Berg visited the actual sites and geography of the Battle of Okinwana — including Shuri Castle, the island’s fortified hills, and the peace memorial — which helped him understand what kind of film he wanted to make.
The journey also reinforced his determination not to treat the story as a triumphalist spectacle. “There’s a tremendous respect for the men and women and a sense of regret for the system that puts them in that situation,” Berg says. “I didn’t want to glamorize it or sensationalize it.”
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Sports media personality and former NFL kicker Pat McAfee brings his football bona fides to The Mosquito Bowl as a fictional Marine drill instructor. McAfee, who spent eight seasons with the Indianapolis Colts and now hosts The Pat McAfee Show and serves as an analyst on ESPN’s College GameDay, helps give the recruits an unforgettable jolt of reality, pushing them out of their old lives as college athletes and into the grueling world of Marine training.
