Nicholas Galitzine bombed his “Dunkirk” audition.
The “Mary and George” actor recalled to Variety the time he messed up his tryout scene in front of Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan while Nolan was casting the 2018 war film.
Galitzine said that while he “got very far” in the casting process, he botched the actual reading opposite Nolan.
“He starts reading the scene, [but] it’s not the scene that I prepared,” Galitzine said. “I’m just staring at him for what feels like an eternity. And I finally plucked up the courage to say, ‘I’m sorry, Christopher Nolan, you have the wrong scene or I’d just been royally screwed up by my team.’”
Perhaps needless to say, Galitzine was not cast in “Dunkirk” — he instead marked his breakout role with “Red, White, and Royal Blue.” The actor stars in upcoming romantic drama “The Idea of You” alongside Academy Award winner Anne Hathaway.
“Dunkirk” writer/director Nolan previously told IndieWire’s Anne Thompson that casting the sprawling war epic hinged on finding actors who mirrored the real-life ages of the soldiers the historical drama was capturing.
“I didn’t want a 30-year-old pretending to be 25; some [soldiers] were 18 or younger. We wanted 18-, 19-, 20-year-old unknowns,” Nolan said. “I gave them the bad news up front. They were very relieved when we turned up with [Tom] Hardy, [Mark] Rylance, and [Kenneth] Branagh later on, when we started to realize that officers were older generation, in their 30s and 40s. I wanted to avail myself of the best-possible actors. Branagh anchors the movie with a sense of authority the audience taps into.”
Nolan continued, “When you’re going to try and do something radical, you don’t want to give people too much opportunity for misunderstanding your intentions. So the further you can get it on your own, the further you can advance your conception of the project and the script before you present it to them, the better chance they have of connecting with the material and understanding.”
Nolan noted that the “Dunkirk” script marked the “first time I’ve told a real story about real people’s lives and deaths and I felt a great responsibility to that.” Sounds like great practice for “Oppenheimer.”
