Nate Mann on Playing the Legendary Bombardier Pilot Robert Rosenthal in Apple TV’s ‘Masters of the Air’

Nate Mann is a young actor just getting started in his career. He’s a name you may not know well yet, but after his performance as legendary WW2 bombardier Robert Rosenthal, that may be about to change. As Rosenthal, Mann gives a subtle, but commanding performance as a heroic pilot who flew more bombing missions than any other pilot during the war. As soon as Mann steps on screen in Masters of the Air, you immediately know he is a man of significance before the actor who plays him says a single line. I don’t know if that sort of gravitas is something you can learn or not as an actor, I only know that Mann has it. In our conversation, we discussed his approach to playing such a significant real-life character, as well as what it must have meant for Rosenthal being a Jew and fighting for both his ancestry and his country.

Awards Daily: You’re obviously very young in your career at this point, and you’re joining what is a sort of a loose trilogy of important historical dramatizations. Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and then obviously Masters of the Air. You’re also playing a real person, which can come with a feeling of responsibility. Did you have a certain sense of this is big?

Nate Mann: You know, when I got the phone call that I was able to be a part of this show, obviously that was a big deal. The other part of it is exactly what you said, which is that my job at the end of the day is to play this guy, this real person, and his experience was big in its own way, in fact, big and multi-dimensional. As you start to focus on a part and a character and a world, you lose a sense of what’s come before, and the project and how big it is, or what it means, or your career or anything like that, which is a nice part of getting to be able to sink your teeth into something like this. 

Awards Daily: I don’t think I’ve ever seen any film or series spend that much time in the air and that much time with technical jargon and how things work. There’s not a lot of over-explaining, which I think is good. All we have to understand is that the characters know that thing that they’re talking about is important. In your preparation to play a pilot of a bombardier in the 1940s, what did you put yourself through to make sure that you sounded like a pilot and looked like a pilot?

Nate Mann: There’s a bunch of different levels to it. One of the things is that the reason this show got made at the time that it did, even though it was in the works for many, many years, was that the technology we needed in order to make it only came along recently. The reason we haven’t seen aerial sequences quite like this is because they’ve never really been done like this before. That was a tremendous advantage of the project, but it was also a learning curve too. Everyone’s kind of learning how to shoot it and how to act it right. Like what it means to have the mask on, and to move through, and have all the eye lines, and sort all this out. We worked with screens, and how the screens worked and how we interacted with them was a whole part of the process of making this. The other part of that, in terms of the preparation of it, I’ve always said it’s one thing to learn to play a pilot, and it’s another thing to learn how to play a really good pilot. I tried to spend as much time as I could. We worked with some amazing technical advisors who have good knowledge of these planes and they said go home and try this flight simulator. I would spend hours on playing basically a video game. They’re very good, those things are amazing. You can go through starting it up to trying to get it in the air, and failing at that many times. (Laughs) By the time I ended up in England and we were shooting, I tried to have as much knowledge as I could and then kind of work to turn that into a physical experience, the tactile experience of making something like that. Again, it was important not just to make it look right, but also to make it feel fluid so that when you’re communicating to somebody in the plane, you know where that impulse comes from. If you’re taxiing on a plane, or even at the airport, you can listen in to air traffic control. There’s a bunch of different ways you can do that. It’s amazing, the way that they communicate, very fast and clipped. It’s different when you’re trying to tell a story like we are. The experience and the expertise is just by ear. That’s one of the most satisfying parts of getting to play something like that.

Awards Daily: You and your character have a particular responsibility when you come into the show because you’re not there from the beginning. One of the reasons the show works so well, but also creates a bit of a high wire, is that there are people we start the show with and think are going to be around for a while, and many of them don’t make it. There is this churn of characters, because if you are to be accurate to the death rate of the early bombardiers, you have to change characters. So you come in in the early middle of the show and then you become a co-lead like that. Did that create any additional pressure for you?

Nate Mann: That’s an interesting question. It kind of piggies back to what you were asking before about a sense of whether it felt big and the sense of responsibility to the project. You get to episode four and you’re like okay, who’s this guy, right? My way into that was just to take what was written, to say he’s spent all this time back home and he’s itching to get in there. But what does he know? What does he not know yet? A little bit of it is just the stone cold facts of what actually happened. Munster was his third mission he ever flew. The fact that that just ends up as an early experience of his time on the base is formative by nature. And because it’s formative, it propels him into the rest of the show. In certain ways, the story is doing so much of that work. The last thing I want to do is play the new leader, or feign some kind of I’m the new guy on the street. If you show up to something and you don’t know what you’re in for, you’re coming from a place of innocence. Maybe what separated Rosie was that it was obvious that he just really wanted to do a good job. He wanted to be a good pilot. 

Awards Daily: You have presence. As Rosenthal, when you walk on the screen, I immediately knew you were important. Most of the people fighting during World War II were very young men, but Rosenthal has that old soul kind of thing about him and I don’t know how you just tapped into that. Maybe you are an old soul?

Nate Mann: When I researched Rosie and got to interviews he did late in his life and he talked about his time growing up and what that was like in his family a little bit, you kind of get to know the kind of man he is. He had so much grace and so much warmth, and also a lot of confidence and a lot of focus. All of those things make for a good leader in a situation like that, in wartime. If my job was to follow the breadcrumbs of what makes this man a person and the person that he was, we have to believe that he would become a leader in the series. And that’s kind of my job.

Awards Daily: John Orloff (show creator and writer), who I talked to days ago spoke really highly of you. The thing that he said gave him this feeling of incredible responsibility was to depict the lives of characters who were in terrible danger all the time, many of whom died. Robert Rosenthal should be legendary, and I’m sure in certain spaces he is, such as  the Air Force, and the military in general. He flew more missions than anybody. Is there a satisfaction outside of just giving a good performance in knowing that you helped illuminate somebody that people should know more about?

Nate Mann: Completely. I hadn’t known about him, so I got to sort of firsthand, initially learning about him, go through it. You’re like oh, he did what? That’s insane. You know, it’s just insane. It’s so awesome for people like John to be so enthusiastic about telling these peoples’ stories , because it makes the experience of playing it that much more exciting and that much more meaningful, because you believe in it, this is important. 

Awards Daily: Rosenthal had a sense of duty that I think went beyond the average bear. He had completed his 25th mission. He could have gone home. Then they upped the missions from 25 to 30, which if you were at 24 missions was a really rough change to the threshold. But Rosenthal refuses to leave. It was probably hard not to be in awe of that, knowing the level of danger that they were constantly in, to try to get across a guy who would say my responsibility is here now, and I’m not leaving. 

Nate Mann: It was kind of astonishing when I first learned about it. I tried to work to a place where it felt like what I imagined it was like for him. I don’t think going back home was an option for him. I don’t think that it was ever comfortable for him or even a notion he could take seriously. On one hand, there’s just the weight of the responsibilities he had to the men around him. That was such a big piece of it. He understood that at that point in the war, you really needed men with experience. The turnover rate meant that younger guys were coming in on their first missions and flying by the seat of their pants. They needed someone to look up to and to learn from, quite frankly, who just had experience. It’s a little bit of that, and then the scene itself is about what it would feel like to be home knowing that you couldn’t work toward victory, if you couldn’t contribute. I just think he was a guy for whom that existentially would frustrate him. It was equal parts a self awareness of his position, and that there just is no other choice. He just felt compelled. He couldn’t live with himself if he took himself out. Once you’ve come face to face with death, so repeatedly, that many times, the stakes of your life take on a little bit of a different dimension. He was right there. He’d sat with it. He’d seen men die around him. He knew what it meant, and what the cost was, and so he stayed on board. 

Awards Daily: I think a thing that gets seeded early on, in at first a funny way (“I’m a Jew from Brooklyn. What do I know about horses?”), is Rosenthal being Jewish, which had to have meant something different in World War II as an American fighting the Nazis. What happens later after getting shot down, and then going to the Zabikow camp, is terrifying. You’ve been up in the air the whole time, and then he’s on the ground and he’s seeing what the Nazis have done firsthand–the bodies piled up in that camp. Without actually hitting the nail on the head too hard, I think you could see Rosenthal feeling his own ancestry. That, coupled with Rosenthal talking to the elderly refugee who was forced by the Nazis to bury his fellow villagers. Obviously, it’s different from being a European Jew, because they’ve been dealing with the war on the ground for a long time. But through Rosenthal’s eyes, I think we get a different understanding in part because of who he is, ancestrally, so to speak. 

Nate Mann: That’s absolutely right. The larger understanding of Germany and the Nazis, the kind of anti-Semitism as it was expressed in policy, was pretty well understood for decades beforehand. The other thing that people don’t really think about is that in the States too, that was also the case. He grew up in Brooklyn, in the 20s, and he would have seen marches and riots and things like that happening in the places around him. We don’t tend to think about that, but that’s absolutely right. Obviously, it’s such an elemental foundational part to the Nazi plan. When it comes to the show, that’s something that I think completely fuels Rosie’s fire. The sequence that you’re talking about in episode nine, of landing in Russia and then happening upon a camp–which is true–is one of being truly face to face and really comprehending the scale and the dimension of how brutal the camps were, that the camps existed freely even, and what it would have felt like to witness that and for those to be your people. I’m Jewish on my father’s side, so that was something that I knew from the start of this series was going to be an important element for me to lean into if I was going to really understand Rosie and what got him through to the end of it.

Awards Daily: You made the interesting choice to underplay the moment at the camp. You let it wash over Rosie, it’s just the slight changes in facial expression as you’re looking around. It’s not like you sit there and start making a speech or something, it’s just the absorption. The decision to underplay, because the horror speaks for itself, but you also have to reflect that, can be hard for an actor. There’s a tendency to want to emote more. Was that direction, or was that something that you felt was appropriate for the character, or both?

Nate Mann: It was purposeful insofar as, as you said, the horror kind of speaks for itself. The experience of the shock of it was more important to me than ultimately having comprehended all of the pieces. Once you understand what has happened, which might take a little while, then it’s different. If you just happen upon a situation like that and don’t really know what you’re expecting, I tried to take it in kind of as we would take it in. I felt like that would be the best way of reflecting it to the viewer. 

Awards Daily: You must feel immensely proud to be a part of this project and to have represented so well someone who actually existed and deserves to be better known. For actors, or anybody in film, it’s like you do a job and then you go to your next job. Is Rosenthal going to stick with you longer perhaps than other parts might? 

Nate Mann: That’s a great question. I don’t know. I spent so much time learning about him. In real life, I met his family and I met a few of the other veterans who knew him and people who knew him, and I felt like I got to know him. That’s such a unique part of getting to do a job like this. In that way, they will completely stick around because it feels more like it’s happening in life, in addition to in the show. He was such an impressive guy that I couldn’t help but be inspired by what happened to him, and the choices he made, and the guy he ended up being. So, it’ll certainly stick around in my mind, yeah.

Awards Daily: Good project to be a part of, huh? 

Nate Mann: It was a great project.