Interview: Callum Turner Discusses Becoming John Egan in ‘Masters of the Air’

In joining Apple TV+’s Masters of the Air, actor Callum Turner was completely unfamiliar with the story of Major John Egan and the 100th Bomber Group. However, he reveals that starring in a series similar to what Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks created with Band of Brothers and The Pacific has been on his mind for a long time, as he tells Awards Radar on Zoom:

“It’s a seminal TV show I watched when I was about 15 with my friend and his dad because it’s everyone’s dad’s favorite TV show. When I signed with my agent when I was about 21, she said to me, we need to get you something like Band of Brothers because it was a pool of talent of people in the UK and Ireland, like Michael Fassbender and Tom Hardy, amongst so many others. That was an exciting prospect. So we manifested it for 10 years. It was always on my radar to do one spectacular piece of television. I’ve always wanted to be a part of it. And I think it was probably about time that these guys got their story told because it truly is extraordinary what they did and put themselves into the most volatile atmosphere known in warfare ever. The percentile of these guys coming home is 23%. 77% of these men went down. Either they died, or they went to the POW camp. It’s an extraordinary feat of warfare and bravery.”

The core of Egan’s character arc in the series is his friendship with Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austin Butler). The series’ first episode opens with the two at an officers club as one of them gets ready to deploy. When the two actors realized that their friendship would be at the core of the show, Turner says they spent as much time as they could with one another to develop a real bond that would ultimately translate itself on the screen:

“They both joined before Pearl Harbor, and both realized that they were going to be an integral part of this fight against the Nazis. They’re bonded by that, which creates a sense of trust, stability, and a knowing that they’ll always be there for each other in an unprecedented way for anyone around them. That’s what I love about their relationship. They have this Yin and Yang thing going on, which means that Cleven is the one who stays at home and doesn’t drink, while Egan is the one flying everywhere, drinking, chasing women, dancing, singing, and being as outlandish as possible. That’s because he doesn’t know how to deal with the trauma he’s enduring and is trying to straighten the canoe out. When we realized that we would set the tone as the show’s two leads and had to take this in our stride, we spent as much time as possible from the first day Austin got to London. We were really inseparable and opened up to each other about who we were to develop that trust ourselves.”

To solidify the bond with the other actors, Turner and the rest of the cast went on a boot camp, which made him learn about the process of “crew glue,” where each crew member in the plane has equal importance:

“Gary Goetzman gave us everything. Dale Dye came for two weeks of boot camp. We had flight training in the simulator. There was no stone unturned in the preparation for this. The boot camp created crew glue, which was the idea that in the Air Corps, you’re fighting not just for yourself but for the man next to you. That was the thing that was drilled into us over and over again in the exercises that we were doing in that boot camp. We had many guys who were just committed to this show, honoring these men in the way they deserved to be honored. Everyone was so present and willing to tell it how it should be told, and it was such a beautiful time.”

During our full conversation, seen below, we also talked about the research process that Turner underwent to sink his teeth into Egan’s story, which he believes has a Shakespearean arc. We also discussed Egan’s most heroic moment in the ninth episode, as he replaced the Stalag VII flag with the American one, and discussed the challenges of shooting such a massive action setpiece.

You can listen to my full interview with Callum below and stream all episodes of Masters of the Air on Apple TV+ today:

[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]