Brendan Fraser figured he knew his history. Growing up in Holland in the 1970s, he’d go to London and visit the Imperial War Museum. He got to see military hardware. “It’s eye-opening,” he says. “It was scary to me.”
He’d read books. He’d seen the films, and he even heard first-hand accounts from neighbors who hid paintings from Nazis. Yet, there was one story he didn’t know about: how General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Captain James Stagg found themselves under pressure in the 72 hours before D-Day. As the fate of the free world hangs in the balance, Eisenhower and Stagg face an impossible choice: launch the largest and most dangerous seaborne invasion in history or risk losing the war altogether. That story is the subject of his latest film, “Pressure.”
Fraser says, “When director Anthony Maras sent me this screenplay based on David Haig’s play, and it was about the weekend before the landing on the beaches of Normandy, I thought, ‘I guess that could be interesting.’”
In the film, Andrew Scott plays Stagg, the Scottish meteorologist tasked with assembling a D-Day weather forecast for Eisenhower, played by Fraser.
As Fraser read the screenplay, he learned numerous things. “I didn’t know there was a delay.” He says, “In our modern life, we look at a phone to tell us what we need to know. In 1944, meteorology was largely looking at a window, the sky, or the records kept from years previous. The science of that was still being formulated, and this screenplay impressed on me how much was at stake, and the cost of delaying the invasion would have had.”
