Taking place during World War 2, Masters of the Air serves as sort of a third leg of a stool first established by Band of Brothers and then by The Pacific (both, along with Masters, produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks). While Band focused on the ground war in Europe, and The Pacific on the ground with American soldiers facing down the Japanese, Masters of the Air takes the war to the skies, telling the stories of the bombardier pilots and crew who embarked on incredibly dangerous bombing missions over Germany. The technology of the modern era creates an extraordinary authenticity when the US planes engage with the German fighter planes. Yet still, for all its technical brilliance, this is predominantly a story about the humans that went up in the air–both the ones who never came home, and the ones who came home, but would never be the same.
For any actor, there is an extra depth of responsibility in playing a real-life character, as Callum Turner does in Masters of the Air. To make matters more challenging, that real life character, John “Bucky” Egan, was a larger than life personality. A man not given over to humility, a person who walks into a room and draws attention from the crowd before he even speaks. Egan is cocky, flamboyant, and full of certainty. Then comes the war.
In our conversation, Turner and I discuss who Egan was at the beginning of the war, before the reality of the horror of being surrounded by death in the skies, before being shot down, before becoming a POW, and how those experiences changed him. Egan’s story is one of confidence that turns to humility.
Awards Daily: When I talked to John Orloff, he said that a large part of this show is a love story between “Buck” played by Austin Butler and “Bucky” played by you. Would you agree with that assessment?
Callum Turner: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a buddy epic. It flows into the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid style. It becomes a road movie in a sense if you want to look at it like that, it really does. I think the relationship between them is so pivotal, so vital, because it’s representing a greater thing. It’s really representing that together we are stronger, together we can do things that are greater than by just doing it by ourselves. There are lots of wonderful relationships in this show: Raff Law and his guys, the engineers, and Anthony (Boyle) and Nate’s (Mann) characters, Austin and mine and Laurie (Davidson) and Emma (Canning), there’s so many snippets of life. Ultimately, the other thing when you’re watching something, it’s all about the emotion through that. Otherwise you’d just watch a documentary. I think those are the things that power this series through. What I loved about Buck and Bucky is that they both joined up before Pearl Harbor. They both wanted to fight the good fight in the way that they knew how. They are both the best pilots in the business at that moment. They kind of just follow each other around, and they build this trust, and they know that they’re going to be integral to winning the war in some way. That bonds them for life. They go through something like a six month training process, and then they go off to war and fight it together. They’re together at the roots. And then they have this yin and yang style relationship that is almost the branches of their personalities, where they can just be free and funny or not. And they can be themselves. I think that’s one of the most beautiful things any friendship can give, the opportunity or the space to be yourself.
Callum Turner and Austin Butler in “Masters of the Air,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Austin and I really focused on that. That was key for us. We’re not directing the episodes, so what we’re in control of is the relationship and what that means to the show. We spent a lot of time together. We were pretty inseparable for the first three months or so, building that relationship, opening up to each other, sharing who we are to each other and building that trust in the way that Buck and Bucky did. And then as actors, we both respect each other a lot and would allow each other to explore things in the show and in our performances, because we created that safe space. At times I’d just be trying to make Austin laugh, because that’s what I think Bucky would have been doing to Buck. And if I wasn’t making him laugh, live in the scene, I’d go again or I’d do something that really did make him laugh, and I’d go okay, well, I’ll try something else. Especially that singing sequence, that was a real ‘just make Buck laugh’ moment. I think that’s the heartbeat of anything. When you watch something, it’s all about the relationships that are developing on screen.
Awards Daily: Your character, Bucky/John Egan, is I think the biggest personality on the show. When you mention that yin and yang that you and Butler have, because Butler’s character is way more laid back, you see how they sort of coalesce as people. But there is a risk when you’re playing a character with such an expansive personality. How did you find that balance of having John be this cock of the walk, but not going too far out?
Callum Turner: Well, the balance was found in the edit. What I am trying to say is that I would go too far, and I would be too big, or I would be too stupid, or I would be too angry. I think that the exploration of a character is that, for me anyway. I’d love to be as free as possible, even if it’s someone that’s quiet. The boundaries were far greater than ever before. And that was the thrill of playing Egan. The joy of playing Egan was that expanse, that vastness, that I had to run with. Otherwise it wouldn’t have made sense, you know? The more that I would go that way, the more Austin could then go the other way and really root himself, and I could fly. We just really wanted to complement each other in that, because I thought we both thought that was the only way to make this work.
Egan’s journey is really extraordinary. Starting off, I always had this image of him looking out over Lake Michigan, looking at the horizon, thinking what am I going to do with my life? This war starts, and he decides I’m going to do that. So he joins up, and he does this training process for six months, and he becomes one of the best pilots in the system. He’s given authority and he’s a leader and they respect him now. And he and Cleven (Buck–Austin Butler) become best friends. There’s that opening scene where he’s like I’m just going to go over and do some observation missions. There’s almost this naivety to it, but he feels like he can do this himself. And he realizes in the next scene that this is going to be hell. He has to one, save the plane, and then two, go down and save someone’s life, keep someone alive who’s been shot to pieces underneath. That really is the start of his epic journey. It became Shakespearean for me. What happens to someone who watches their friends being ripped to shreds or blown up or fall to the ground from 25,000 feet without a parachute, what happens to their soul? And then what happens to someone who’s also going over Europe and dropping bombs knowing that he’s killing people? That’s going to take its toll, and it does take its toll on Egan. That’s why he drinks. That’s why he smokes. That’s why he dances. And that’s why he sings. The more pain he feels, the more he drinks. The more trauma he’s living, the more he sings, the more he runs. He’s just trying to keep that canoe straight. But he’s already embarked on this epic journey. It’s a long day’s journey into night. And there’s no way out. The only way out is through.
And he knows that he’s going to have to get back in that plane. He knows he’s going to have to kill more people, and he doesn’t know if he’s going to die. He knows that when they go up with 17 planes, only three are going to come back, and he loses 140 men that are on his watch. What does that do to someone? When I say Shakespearean, I mean Macbeth, when he says I’ve got blood on my hands. Egan can see the blood, he can smell the blood. He’s having an existential crisis in the middle of this war. He’s got nothing to hold on to. He doesn’t know who he is anymore, he’s changed completely as a human being. I can’t begin to imagine what that felt like. When Cleven says to Egan you need a weekend pass, only seven months into them being there, I want the audience to be like yeah, you do. You really need a break because you’re in trouble. That was really the journey that I wanted to go on with Egan. There’s a photo of this Russian soldier, in 1918, after he’s come back from the war, and there’s a photo of him before he goes to the war. Before, he’s fresh faced, proud to go fight for his country. And then after the war, he’s somehow miraculously survived, and he’s a shell of a man. His soul’s left his body. And that’s what happens to John Egan. The trauma is irreversible. He’s not coming back. My grandfather went to war, and he would never speak about it. All these men went to war, women went to war, and they would never speak about what they saw. There’s a reason for that, because they want to forget, because it changed them. The horrors and the atrocities that they had to live through is what we were trying to bring to life. I think that’s why this show is so good, because it honors them in the way that they deserve to be honored. It doesn’t glamorize them. It doesn’t glorify them. It doesn’t make them heroes. They are heroes. They just are. But it shows what happens when these people have to live through these experiences.
Awards Daily: Egan’s character represents a level of anger, and I think you pinpointed it saying watching his buddies get torn to pieces on a regular basis. His perspective compared to some of the other bombardiers that are looking to drop bombs on Berlin when they start hitting civilian targets is very different from some of the other characters. He wants to hit them where it hurts, but then what happens is he gets shot down and he gets on the ground and then from there what his character experiences changes, silently, I think, his perspective.
Callum Turner: There’s no coming back. It’s a tragedy what these guys had to go through, what the world had to go through. It’s a tragedy. And it’s going to have a lasting effect. That was something that really was my focal point, my understanding of what Egan felt when he was living there and what happened to him after. It’s really that before and after, that photo of the Russian soldier, who was excited to fight for his country and then realized that he’d gone into something that was uncontrollable for him and impossible to even begin to understand.
Callum Turner in “Masters of the Air,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Awards Daily: When your character crashes in Germany, eventually he is captured. Before you are, you have the opportunity to either kill or not kill children who may point you out. Egan has to make a decision there about who he is in this war, even though that decision, in part, leads to him getting captured.
Callum Turner: They had morals. I think that the whole idea of what is acceptable and then what you do on the ground–there were rules that you had to stand by. You couldn’t change into civies, you had to stay in uniform in order to get into the POW. John Egan isn’t going to shoot a kid in order to survive. I’m sure that may have happened in some cases during the war, but John Egan wasn’t going to be one of them. I think in that moment, also, the reason that he didn’t pull the trigger was because he didn’t want to alert anyone to where he was. In all the research that I did, once you were on the ground, it was just about survival. It was about staying alive and not being caught in that part of being on the ground.
Awards Daily: After being captured, he then goes through this gauntlet where not only are the Nazis being abusive towards him and the group that’s been captured, but so are civilians. You can understand why. Their homes, their lives, are destroyed. I thought it was really interesting for the show to bring in that perspective of the war. That of the German civilian.
Once you’re in the process of being in the POW and being interrogated, then it was about disrupting the Germans as much as possible, because that was your duty. If that meant stopping a supply, or giving information that was wrong, or leading the Germans down the path that they shouldn’t be going down, or burning a camp, that was the only way you could fight. I think the damage, by that point, had already been done in terms of his psyche and what happens to him in that whole segment. Once he’s caught, the civilian sequence is really extraordinary, and it was hard to shoot, really. The trauma that he’s experiencing going through was insane. There’s no coming back to normal after that.
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