‘Pressure’ star Brendan Fraser: D-Day was intensely personal for Ike

NEW YORK, May 25 (UPI) — Oscar-winning actor Brendan Fraser says he sees U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the hero he plays in the new film, Pressure, as someone who genuinely cared about the men under his command.

In theaters Friday, the movie is based on David Haig’s stage play, which takes place in the 72 hours before Eisenhower’s planned D-Day invasion when the leader is suddenly faced with conflicting weather reports from two respected meteorologists and must decide who to listen to.

The memory of a recent disastrous training exercise that killed hundreds of American servicemen added to the stress Eisenhower was under at this critical juncture of World War II in 1944 France.

“He had a creed that was duty-bound and that was coupled with his intense concern for the well-being of those 300,000 troops that he commanded on that morning to attack a rainy beach that everyone knew would be a fight with bare knuckles against a chainsaw,” Fraser, 57, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.

“I considered the conscience he had to have had, knowing that only six weeks earlier from that morning was the awful result of an exercise called Tiger that had gone horribly awry when a communication was missed at sea,” he said.

“That meant, that, in a joint exercise, the American troops had stormed a beach in England — which emulated the same conditions of Utah Beach — had been hit with live fire and it took the lives of 749 Army and Navy and it’s not a real stretch for me to personalize what was intensely personal to him, too.”

Asked how he separated the man from the myth, Fraser said he didn’t know much about Eisenhower’s military career before agreeing to play him in Pressure.

“I didn’t know the myth, honestly. I thought I was a well-informed consumer of pop culture and history and, if I really thought about it, I didn’t have an automatic association with Dwight D. Eisenhower during the war years,” Fraser explained.

“If I were to say [Douglas] MacArthur or [George] Patton, automatically, you go, ‘Oh, yes, of course, of course.’ If you said, Eisenhower, I would, personally, think of the pin [people wore] during his presidency. ‘I like Ike,'” he added.

“I really didn’t know who he was, but, of course, I did some research and there’s a LOT to do and I grew to admire him for his ability to be diplomatic and listen to every opinion, still have the leadership quality to make the decision about it, give credit to those who have the good idea — just like all the best directors I’ve ever worked with — and to be accountable for the choices that he made. That may seem like the commands of a good boy scout, but the truth was he lived by it.”

The star of The Mummy franchise, School Ties, Blast From the Past, Encino Man, The Whale and Rental Family said he studied the photos of Eisenhower talking to his men about fly fishing, card games and their families.

“He cared. He had to have seen in those 20-something-year-old soldiers, his own kids, and he definitely felt the weight of the 749 who history buried until the 1980s, effectively for reasons of secrecy, that just sort of went off into the miasma,” Fraser said.

“So, there’s a lot to work with here and Eisenhower became a very interesting and fascinating subject for me. I’m no authority. There are proper historians and military nerds,” he laughed.

“I welcome them to come forward to pick my performance in this film apart. I want them to because we want to be held accountable, like Ike,” he added. “It’s with the best intentions to heed the warning call when we consider that past could dangerously become prologue.”

The film co-stars Andrew Scott, Chris Messina, Damian Lewis, Con O’Neill and Kerry Condon.