Nate Mann (‘Masters of the Air’) on playing a real-life WWII pilot: ‘He felt familiar to me in a way that just jumped off the page’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

As soon as he looked at the script for the nine-part, $250 million World War II epic limited series “Masters of the Air” that recounts the exploits of the famed Bloody Hundredth bomber group that wreaked carnage onto Nazi Germany, Nate Mann felt a kinship and a destiny to the character he was auditioning to play. His name was Robert Rosenthal, known to all as Rosie, a quintessential hotshot bomber pilot who became one of the most decorated airmen to survive the war. “It’s hard to explain,” Mann stresses, “but reading Rosie in the script, he felt familiar to me in a way that just jumped off the page. I just thought he was amazing. I put a couple of auditions together, and the next thing I knew, I was over in the UK for a two-week bootcamp.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.

Mann, 27, was pretty much an unknown commodity until this year. He had a role in the 2021 Paul Thomas Anderson feature “Licorice Pizza.” But in 2024, the Julliard graduate’s career has exploded with roles in both “Masters” and in the seven-part Peacock mystery drama “Apples Never Fall.” “It just so happened that these two shows were made in more or less quick succession, and I’m excited that they’ve come out in the way they have,” he says.

In “Masters of the Air,” which was shot entirely in London, Mann is part of a stellar cast that includes Oscar nominees and BAFTA winners Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan along with Callum Turner and Anthony Boyle. There were only a few American-born actors involved in the project, with Mann and Butler being two of them. “One of the best parts of the job was that, because it was a long shoot, we were able to spend so much time together in quite close quarters,” Mann recalls. “Josh Bolt, who plays my co-pilot, and I are still friends. We spent literally weeks together. By the end of the shoot, everyone was real close.”

Besides his fellow performers, Mann also grew close to the flight simulator for the B-17 bomber whose operation he was tasked with mastering. He says he often felt like a little kid strapped into the cockpit connected to hydraulic gimbals. The challenge was in looking like he knew what he was doing. “It’s one thing to play a pilot,” he asserts, “and another to play a really great pilot. I had to become proficient enough on the B-17 so I could feel comfortable and confident when we were shooting a particularly challenging sequence, to maintain the kind of composure that (Rosenthal) pretty astoundingly had. I had to know where to reach, where to look, what to pull, how everything worked as best I could  without actually having ever been up in the air in one of those machines. It was really important to all of us to be fluent enough in the cockpit to make it feel as authentic as possible.”

While researching Rosie’s life and watching video of interviews conducted by his son, Mann came to idolize the man he was portraying, noting, “He was such a brilliant man and so warm. But he also just had this focus, this drive to him that I found really, really compelling.” Indeed, Rosenthal comes across in “Masters of the Air” as the most skillful pilot of the lot, described by Mann as “a total badass” who had already spent thousands of hours in the cockpit before showing up in England to fly and conduct more than two-dozen missions. “So I worked a lot with our military advisors who had flown those (same) planes,” he adds.

The one thing that couldn’t be taught, and where Mann’s acting chops really came into play, was in conveying what it was like being in the middle of mortal aerial combat beyond the technical aspect. “Obviously, the experience of being in the air and being genuinely shot at and shooting back at people who are trying to kill you is not what was happening for us,” he emphasizes. “Our job was to (convey) the stakes of that situation, what is was like for these men to bear their loss and wake up in the morning and see who was there and who wasn’t. The question I kept coming back to was, ‘What gets you back in the plane after particularly precarious mission after mission?’ These men didn’t speak too much in the language of trauma that we understand today. These guys were quite literally flying by the seat of their pants and not really having any tools to be able to deal with it.”

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