‘Boys in the Boat’ actors visit Seattle where the rowers they portrayed trained

SEATTLE — To transform an actor into a believable Olympic-level rower isn’t easy. Just ask the cast of the 2023 movie “The Boys in the Boat,” who came to Seattle to experience rowing up close at the Windermere Cup Regatta on the Montlake Cut — the same location where their 1930s counterparts trained for three years at the University of Washington before winning Olympic gold in 1936 Berlin.

“It’s surreal to see it in person,” said actor Tom Varey.

Five members of the cast — Luke Slattery, who played coxswain Bobby Moch; Jack Mulhern, who played stroke seat Don Hume; Sam Strike, who played bow seat Roger Morris; Varey, who played 4 seat Johnny White; and Bruce Herbelin-Earle, who played 6 seat George “Shorty” Hunt — sat down briefly at the UW’s Conibear Shellhouse last week to share memories of making the film, based on local author Daniel James Brown’s bestselling book and shot in the U.K. in early 2022. (The movie wasn’t shot locally in part because the U.K. offers an exceptional tax credit, and has multiple production facilities and a solid base of local film crew and cast. And director George Clooney said in an interview at the time of the film’s December release that he had considered shooting in Seattle but concluded, after a scouting visit, that it just didn’t look like 1936.)

“I think we made his blood run cold a little bit,” said Slattery, of the first time Clooney saw the crew in action on the water. Of the nine actors in the boat, only one (Joel Phillimore, who played Gordy Adam) had ever rowed before; all of them, before filming, were immersed in a two-month boot camp, where they worked with trainers and elite-level rowers, alternating sessions on the water with weightlifting and watching rowing films. The actors would be interspersed in boats with the rowers, Mulhern said, and “you could imitate the technique of the person in front of you.”

In the middle of training, Clooney showed up unexpectedly one day — unfortunately, not an ideal day. “We had been training on these state-of-the-art carbon fiber shells, and then on the one day we switched to the (period-appropriate wooden) boat, which is totally imperfect, incredibly heavy … is the one day that Clooney shows up,” Slattery remembered.

“It was the worst we’d ever rowed,” said Varey. He described seeing Clooney, “all excited,” raising his phone to film the actors training, “and then he puts it back down as he realized there’s nothing to film.” (“It was shocking,” said Clooney, in an interview last winter with NPR. “You know, we could put eight kangaroos in a boat, and it would have been more coordinated.”)

But practice makes perfect — or, at least, nearly so. “We course-corrected,” said Mulhern. “You need those moments of abject terror. It’s only up from there, and up we went.” Two months of training — with boot camp creating “the chemistry and the fraternity that you can’t fake” said Slattery — was followed by several months of filming, with the story shot chronologically (an unusual practice for a film) so that the actors’ skills could grow and peak. They knew that the real-life crew achieved a remarkable 46 strokes a minute, as documented in Brown’s book, but didn’t think that they could reach that goal.

“Everyone knew from the beginning that this abstract number was flying around,” said Mulhern. “We had joked about it, to hit it as a goal, but it wasn’t something we had planned in any way.” The Olympics race — with Swindon, U.K. standing in for Berlin — was the final sequence shot, in the last week of filming, and somehow everything came together. A stroke monitor installed under a seat in the shell confirmed it, just at the moment where the UW rowers have to overcome a two-length deficit: From the boat, the actors could see the crew cheering and applauding. “We didn’t really know at the time but we’d hit the rate on the nose,” Mulhern said.

The old-style wooden boat wasn’t the only challenge presented by using 1930s-appropriate equipment: While a coxswain today might use a voice amplifier, Bobby Moch only had a cone for a megaphone — and, as Moch, Slattery had to yell for hours of shooting, rather than just one brief race. “I would lose (my voice) at the end of every week,” Slattery said. “I would have to go on vocal rest every weekend. My now-wife and I would go to the museum on the weekend, and I would communicate with written notes.”

Two years after filming, the actors remember their immersion into rowing with fondness, with some saying they’re still drawn to the sport. Slattery, who lives in New York City, said he found a rowing machine in the street, “in perfect working order,” and hops on it regularly. “There’s a reservoir near me, but I just haven’t picked up the phone to call and join the boat club,” said Herbelin-Earle. After bonding so closely with this crew, he said, “I’m a little bit nervous to get in a boat with other guys.”

Visiting the University of Washington was a pleasure for the actors, who accepted UW Rowing sweatshirts and caps. Herbelin-Earle said that previously they’d only seen black-and-white footage of the campus and the Cut. “Last night we went to dinner and on the way back, we looked across the water and imagined the boats coming through … It’s still going on, the tradition of rowing through that cut. We’re lucky to be here.”