Heroes play themselves
SACRAMENTO — When director Clint Eastwood first asked Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler to re-enact events from the 2015 French train attack they helped foil, they thought he was talking mechanics.
“When he said that, we were like, ‘Yeah, for the actors? So they can get the fight scene right? Sure,’ ” said Stone, who joined Sadler and Skarlatos for an interview at a Sacramento hotel.
Eastwood had summoned them to his office on the Warner Bros. lot a month into the casting process, leading them to believe he would introduce them to the actors playing them in “The 15:17 to Paris,” Eastwood’s film based on the 2016 book of the same name that the three men had coauthored with Jeffrey E. Stern.
Instead, Eastwood wanted his third docudrama in a row — after star vehicles “American Sniper” and “Sully” — to lean harder on the “docu.” He cast Skarlatos, Stone and Sadler, all now 25, as themselves in “15:17,” which shows how they helped subdue a heavily armed gunman on a crowded high-speed train. The movie was shot in Europe, Sacramento and Atlanta (where Eastwood filmed interior flashback scenes in which juvenile actors play the three as boys).
“His reasoning was, he could have actors, but for this story, he felt like it was important to show our true friendship and our bond,” said Sadler, who befriended Skarlatos and Stone when the three attended the same Sacramento-area Christian school as boys.
Starring in a film was unexpected, but so had been the friends’ trajectory since they boarded a high-speed Amsterdam-to-Paris train on Aug. 21, 2015. Stone, an airman first class, and Skarlatos, an Oregon National Guard specialist (he moved to Oregon as a teen), were off duty, and headed to Paris with Cal State Sacramento student Sadler as part of a European backpacking trip.
They had settled into seats when they heard shots. Stone was already on alert when he saw a man (suspect Ayoub El Khazzani, who reportedly has ties to the cell behind the November 2015 Paris attacks, is still in French custody) headed up the aisle, gun drawn. Stone threw himself at the shooter, whose gun had failed to fire again because of a bad primer in a bullet.
“I saw a moment of ‘Oh, he’s not shooting yet,’ ” Stone said. “And then I thought we were all going to die anyway” and pounced.
Skarlatos joined in, taking the shooter’s rifle and butting his head with its end. Stone performed a chokehold on the gunman. Sadler and British passenger Chris Norman helped subdue the shooter, who lost consciousness.
The scuffle lasted two minutes “but felt like two years,” Sadler said.
Stone used his Air Force medical training to help Mark Moogalian, who had been shot in the neck and was bleeding profusely. Moogalian had first spotted the gunman, strapped with weapons, emerging from the train’s bathroom, and with another passenger had tried to stop him.
Moogalian, an Americanborn Sorbonne professor, survived, as did everyone else on board. Moogalian also appears as himself in “15:17,” the production of which took over a Thalys train on the same route traveled by the train in 2015.
Reliving the tensest moments of their lives was not traumatic, Sadler said: “It had been two years, and our situation was unique in that nobody had a loss of life.” For their roles in preventing that
loss of life, the men received the Legion of Honor from then-French President Francois Hollande.
The incident “immediately turned into a positive thing we could tell others about so they could draw positive things from it,” Sadler said. “To relive it — Clint Eastwood just made it kind of cool for us. We got to do the trip again, but now we are shooting a movie of it.”
Eastwood let them tweak dialogue to sound more naturally like themselves. For the same reason, he did not ask them to take acting classes before filming. Yet they still “caught the acting bug” from the shoot, Stone said, and are pursuing other screen roles.
He and Skarlatos fulfilled their military commitments, and Sadler graduated last year from Cal State Sacramento with a kinesiology degree. Sadler’s father is a pastor, and Sadler and his pals from Christian school say faith still plays a big role in their lives. They believe there was divine intervention on the train that day.
Eastwood let them tweak dialogue to sound more naturally like themselves. For the same reason, he did not ask them to take acting classes before filming.
“When you look at the odds — we almost stayed in Amsterdam an extra day, and the gun didn’t go off,” Skarlatos said. “The odds of being in a terrorist attack alone, and the odds of surviving that terrorist attack — all those together, it was too astronomical to be up to chance.”