Will Poulter, Kit Connor, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai

There was a particular state director Ray Mendoza wanted to keep his “Warfare” cast in at all times: “Never comfortable.”

That may have been the experience on-set of the new A24 war movie (co-directed by Alex Garland) and based entirely on Mendoza’s own memories of an incident from the Battle of Ramadi in Iraq in 2006. But meeting the cast in person and conducting a Q&A with them following a screening of the film in Tampa on March 22, it’s hard not to be struck by just how comfortable they are with each other.

For the first time since A24 took the film on the road for select advance screenings — to date, in Chicago, Washington D.C., Atlanta, and Miami, among others, with San Antonio, Austin, and San Diego among those cities still to follow — the Tampa screening gathered a large number of “Warfare” actors: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (who plays Mendoza), Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and Michael Gandolfini.

They have the effortless camaraderie that can only come from having gone through something together. Because Mendoza sure didn’t make them comfortable on set: He embraced an extraordinary verisimilitude, down to the way he coaxed the performances from his actors, that would result in one of the most accurate war movies ever made. And judging by the positive reaction of the audience, many of whom were invited as current or former service members (Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base is the home to CentCom and from where personnel frequently shipped out to Iraq), Mendoza really got it right.

“I know that we all wanted to create this brotherhood and create this bond because that would make our jobs a lot easier,” Connor said. “So the first thing that we did on our first night was shave each other’s heads, which was something that excited us all and it felt slightly ritualistic. We suddenly felt like we were immediately vulnerable with each other and it just felt like we had each other’s backs. And yeah, we trained. We ate together. We would do everything together. We practically lived in each other’s pockets for about two months. I think it really does come across in the film. There’s a real love between us all.”

“Warfare” depicts an incident in real time in which a unit of Seal Team 5, of which Mendoza was a member for 16 years, was pinned down by insurgents in a Ramadi apartment duplex. One of his comrades, Elliot (Cosmo Jarvis), was badly wounded. And though he and the other SEALs ultimately made it out, Elliot’s injuries were so severe he has no memories of what happened.

For his part, Mendoza, who worked as a military advisor on films such as “Act of Valor,” “Lone Survivor,” and 2024’s “Civil War” (directed by his co-director on “Warfare,” Garland), wanted to make this movie as a way of giving Elliot the memory he had lost. That meant the emotions of the actors had to be absolutely real — not heightened in a Hollywood fashion, but organically emerging from such a meticulous recreation of what happened and utilizing military-style bonding rituals for the cast.

That included putting the cast through a three-week bootcamp to get a condensed version of special forces training. They’d have to rely on each other when they were uncertain if they could even rely on themselves. When you see each of them carrying 60-pound packs in the film, they’re really carrying 60-pound packs.

“The bond that developed naturally through the training and the emotional side of things was taken care of,” Poulter said. “There was very little acting required because when I looked down and saw Joe Quinn [injured] I didn’t have to imagine that I cared for him in that moment. I’d spent every waking minute with him for the couple of months prior.”

“I’ve got close to cast members before, I’ve had really amazing life-affirming experiences,” Poulter added. “But there was nothing like this. And, of course, overlaid on that and perhaps bigger than anything else is the honor that comes with representing real life experiences and real life individuals.”

It’s sometimes said that acting is reacting. Because of the connection formed among the cast, when they’re then seeing each other wounded with bloody makeup effects — not to mention that sound effects of explosions and gunfire were piped in on-set via a speaker system to add to the actors’ sensory overload — the reactions are genuine, spontaneous, and urgently felt.

“It would be a lot harder to bring out these tough emotions for seeing somebody I barely know,” Woon-A-Tai said. “But it was not at all like that because it was, in a sense, too emotional sometimes seeing a lot of our brothers, we feel, in those positions. Even though it was fake and we know it’s fake, sometimes your brain just tricks yourself. So you see a lot of blood and your brain thinks it’s real.”

Added Gandolfini, “Your body doesn’t necessarily know whether you’re acting or not, right? Whether that was having blanks firing outside of the door at all times or explosions hitting you in the face.”

The long days on set, the heavy gear, and the reliance on long-takes in the film to give as authentic and un-manipulated a sense of what it was like to be there, took its toll on the actors, draining them of energy. But that resulted in a greater naturalism too.

“What it does is it actually drills the acting out of you in an amazing way,” Gandolfini said. I’m going to do a lot of actor-y crap for the first minute of the take, but then I get really exhausted and I get really tired. And my job is just to — whether gather my comms equipment to get out of there or help Elliot or whatever the task be at hand — I’m just looking at my fellow actors, all exhausted, doing the motions. We’re doing all of those things. So it’s invaluable because it drills the actor out of you. You’re just completely present.”

“And also for those long takes that we did, we were talking for so long that at some pointif you don’t say your lines you then just automatically resort back to the training that you got prior,” Woon-A-Tai said.

Added Poulter, “We were being prepared to respond to protocol and fall back on our training experience moreso than we were putting on a performance or creating a character.”

Actorly editorializing was far less important than capturing the actual experiences of these real-life men and honoring all they had been through. “Often when you train for a film, it’s to have a six-pack or to look a certain type of way,” Connor said. “There was no aspect in this film that we do that. We were training to be able to do the job. That was really refreshing.”

Training to do the job, not just look the part: That alone is a high compliment the actors’ paid the service members they portrayed. Elliot, who stayed at the same hotel as the cast when they were filming “Warfare” at Bovingdon Airfield Studios, northwest of London, gave his own advice to them about how to move during maneuvers.

It’s obvious that “Warfare” was a singular experience for the cast. They’ve all been a part of many other special projects: As they were filing out, one fan shouted at Poulter, “Loved you in ‘Midsommar’!” and another then shouted “Loved you in ‘Midsommar’ and ‘Bandersnatch’!” to which Poulter smiled — but “Warfare” was the sole thing on his and the other actors’ minds.

After the Q&A, they met with members of the veterans’ organization Team Red, White & Blue, who presented them with custom T-shirts in the actors’ sizes. Clearly, “Warfare” was an experience that’ll stick with them, on many different levels, for a long time.

Said Woon-A-Tai, “Truly, sometimes it didn’t feel like a film.”

“Warfare” will be released in theaters by A24 on Friday, April 11.