The True Story Behind George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat: From Amateur Athletes to Olympic Heroes (Exclusive)

George Clooney knows the story behind it Boys in a boat sounds stranger than fiction. “If we made this up,” he says, “nobody would believe it.”

But the odds-defying story the director tells in his drama, based on Daniel James Brown’s 2013 bestseller of the same name, is historical fact, not Hollywood magic.

As the Great Depression continued to grip the US in the 1930s, nine University of Washington students — who had never held an oar — joined the school’s junior varsity team.

In just three years, they overcame their own physical weaknesses and outlasted qualified teams from wealthy colleges, making it all the way to the 1936 Olympics held in Nazi-occupied Germany, where they rallied the Americans behind them as they faced the elite Third Reich team.

As for the feel-good story, Clooney, 62, jokes, “When your villains are rich kids and Hitler, you win.”

George Clooney directed ‘The Boys in the Boat’.

Laurie Sparham

George Clooney directs Boys in a boat on first look photos and behind the scenes video (exclusive)

At the center of the saga is handsome and strong Joe Rantz, who was abandoned by his father and stepmother when he was a teenager. Despite barely any means, Rantz, a resourceful young man, managed to attend the University of Washington, but struggled to pay his tuition.

At school he found himself in the same, well, boat as many working-class peers competing for only eight spots (plus coxswain) on the JV crew team. What attracted them wasn’t athletic glory: Earning a spot came with a job on campus, which allowed them to stay in school and afford a cheap place to live.

Andrea Liu

Creating a team was not an easy task. “Competitive rowing is an endeavor of exquisite beauty preceded by brutal punishment,” Brown notes in his book. “Unlike most sports, which primarily rely on certain muscle groups, rowing uses almost every muscle in the body intensively and repeatedly.”

Hands bleed and blister, muscles tear, oars can snap and break a rib. “Pain,” notes Brown, “is part of the deal.”

Ali Rantz (plays him Fantastic beasts star Callum Turner, 33, a British heartthrob rumored to be being considered as the next James Bond) was uniquely qualified for the rigors of the sport, even though he had no team experience.

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His hard upbringing forced him to do manual labor at a young age: as a boy he chopped wood for the school’s wood-burning stove and carried heavy trays of food for the miners in the cookhouse. As Brown said, “getting hurt was nothing new to him.”

Not so for Turner, who says the intense preparation was “one of the most exhausting experiences” of his life. In February 2022, before filming began in the UK, the actors playing the crew – including Turner, Mare of Easttownis Jack Mulhern, i New Amsterdam‘s Luke Slattery — committed to two months of training four hours a day on the River Thames.

Bruce Herbelin-Earle, Callum Turner and Wil Coban in ‘The Boys in the Boat’.

Laurie Sparham

“It’s snowing and we’re just thinking, ‘Oh my God,'” Turner recalls. Even after the cameras rolled, they would train harder every day when Clooney yelled, cut. (As they worked up a sweat, Clooney jokes that he would enjoy a “nice pinot.”)

Like the amateur athletes who play, the actors were not skilled at first. “None of us had ever rowed before,” says Turner. And it showed. When Clooney and producing partner Grant Heslov first came to watch the boys in action, “we were grossed out,” Turner says, adding that the director was clearly concerned.

“I could see through Clooney’s smile, there was pain,” he jokes.

Channeling the experience of the real men they play, the actors worked together on the water and built a bond. “There was this competitive nature that encouraged each other,” says Turner. “We all learned that this deep connection is the most important part of this journey and understanding what it was like for these guys to go on and achieve what they did.”

“Boys in a Boat” (2023).

Laurie Sparham/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc.

And what the athletes achieved was extraordinary. They outscored the varsity team in skill, and their stoic coach, Al Ulbrickson (played by Joel Edgerton, 49), made the controversial decision to enter the JV team into races — including an Olympic qualifying regatta.

The “unorthodox” move was “very risky,” explains Brown, who says Ulbrickson’s job was in jeopardy by angering university officials.

But not only was Ulbrickson right, the team he coached encouraged Americans — still reeling from the economic hardships of the Great Depression — to root for Rantz and his teammates as they succeeded against all odds.

Joel Edgerton takes the college rowing team to the Olympics in George Clooney’s The Boys in a boat Trailer

As sports journalist Royal Brougham (played by Chris Diamontapoulos, 48) notes in the film, everyday citizens saw themselves in the “resolute young faces” of “nine working-class boys” as they made it all the way to the Olympics.

Rantz’s daughter, Judy Willman, says she hopes the boys, including her father (who later worked as a chemical engineer at Boeing and had five children with his wife Joyce before he died in 2007), will serve as inspiration. “You can choose to be a survivor instead of a victim,” she says.

At the very least, the action on screen has some viewers in a tizzy, according to Clooney, who attended a recent screening with his wife, human rights attorney Amal Clooney.

“My wife and I were in the middle row,” he says. “You look at all the people in the cinema, and when we got the last race, they’re rowing in their seats!”

Boys in a boat is in theaters on Christmas Day.

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education