Ray Nicholson said the hardest part of playing a real Marine in "The Mosquito Bowl" was getting out of his own way.
At an Oct. 23 press conference for the film, a reporter asked how he made Tony Butkovich his own, given the cinematic legacy in his family. His father is Jack Nicholson, a three-time Academy Award winner. Ray Nicholson joked that his road ran from acting-school drills to something he'd compare to three Oscars, then answered the question straight.
"I think one of the biggest enemies of being an actor is wanting to be good," Nicholson said. "For so long, I had this desire to be good, this desire to prove that I was legitimate, this desire to prove that I was worthy of being my father's son. And I think that I just had to let all that go."
What replaced it, he said, was the work: being of service to his castmates and the script, and letting the family resemblance show without forcing it or hiding it.
"I am me. I am who I am," Nicholson said. "I promised Pete a hundred percent of my heart and soul. Today, I could probably promise him more. But because I went through this experience, my heart and soul grew. So, it's just about being okay with being Ray Nicholson and turning that into Tony Butkovich."
The real Butkovich was a Purdue fullback who set the Big Ten single-season scoring record in 1943 and was drafted by the Cleveland Rams. He enlisted in the Marines and played in the Christmas Eve 1944 game on Guadalcanal that gives Buzz Bissinger's book, and Peter Berg's film, its title. Fifteen of the 65 men who played that day were killed on Okinawa months later. Butkovich was one of them.
A Tom Petty show and a last bright burn
Nicholson said the first note he wrote on the script was two words: Tom Petty. He had seen Petty's final show at the Hollywood Bowl, and he died a week later.
"He burned so brightly," Nicholson said. "And to me, this was this moment for those boys to burn so brightly. It was like this last gasp of this brightness and this invincibility that these kids had."
That invincibility doesn't survive the beach. Nicholson described the landing as "this baptism of hell for 20 minutes where you can hardly breathe, and you come out and you're a completely different person."
"To a certain extent, the boys that we were died on that battlefield anyway," he said.
'It feels anything but heroic'
Asked whether the film changed what heroism means to him, Nicholson pointed to the cost of killing.
"When you've taken a man's life, how does that feel to you?" he said. "It feels anything but heroic. I'm sure it feels harrowing and terrible."
To prepare, he listened to interviews with survivors, many of them men in their 60s and 70s talking about the war for the first time.
"You see behind these wrinkles, it's like, that's a 22-year-old boy that's stuck with what he's done," Nicholson said.
That's the film's real wound. The game was a gift, and it was also a goodbye.
"The Mosquito Bowl" is in theaters now and streams on Netflix beginning Nov. 25. Peter Berg directed and co-wrote it with Mark L. Smith, from Bissinger's book "The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II."
