The Ex-Marine Who Trained Callum Turner and Austin Butler for Masters of the Air Didn't Underestimate the Power of Push-Ups, Sit-Ups, and Pull-Ups
If you need some actors to be whipped into shape, few are better at it than personal trainer and former marine Captain Dale Dye. For Masters of the Air, producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg knew that Dye was the only person worth calling on. After all, he was responsible for getting the cast of raw recruits in shape for Band of Brothers. So successful was his grit and spit training course that he was invited back to torture a new crop of actors—including Rami Malek and Jon Bernthal—for The Pacific in 2010.
Now, a decade and a half later, Hanks and Spielberg are back with a third entry in the best long-form project on war to ever be created. Masters of the Air sees fresh-faced recruits Callum Turner, Austin Butler, and Barry Keoghan take to the skies. But how exactly did Dye get them shredded?
Battle stationsAs well as working in TV, Dye has been a technical military advisor on movies, including Platoon. But he says he doesn’t go in for the typical marine PT instructor approach.
“I’m not shouting insults at them, but I’m very strict, and I’ll call them out in a minute if they piss me off,” says a silver-haired Dye. “My executive officer and my first sergeant have eyes on them constantly. I have to be like a stern Dutch uncle. They don’t want that white-haired guy to get ahold of them. Some of them try to hide in the back with their head down, but I see them. Word gets around before filming,” says Dye. “One actor calls another: Hey, have you ever done anything with this Dale Dye guy? Yeah, that guy’s terrible. So the actors knew what to expect.”
Dye had just under two weeks with the recruits, filming with them outside of London. It’s a bit less than the time allowed on Band of Brothers, and a bit more than he had on The Pacific. Training sessions had to work around costume-fittings, rehearsals, and other commitments, but Dye was determined to get a full 12 hours from his recruits, dividing the time up between physical training, close order drills and classroom stints teaching them above and beyond what it takes to get buff.
“Classroom sessions can get a little dry,” says Dye. “We’ve all been there. But still, I don't want any slouching. If you're going to ask a question, get on your feet, lock yourself in a position of attention, and ask your question. They very quickly get used to that. They learned to think, ‘Oh, yeah, I gotta do this to keep him happy.’”
On maneuvresThe first aim of Dye’s training was to get the actors looking like B17 crews, which meant limbering them up to help them move through the confines of an aircraft, where they would be filming for hours at a time. It was especially important that they have the core strength to pull themselves up and into the belly of the plane, a maneuver they practiced on two mock-up planes.
“In real life, they went eight or nine hours over Nazi-occupied France, and in World War II, they had to learn to soldier before they became aviators, so we focused on getting them looking right in the uniform. Improving their presence and posture.”
Naturally, this meant physical training. “I start with Let’s see if we can get these guys in some kind of shape,” says Dye. “As with any military force, you've got a combination of introverts and extroverts. I’m not sure why, but the UK actors [the likes of Callum Turner and Raff Law] seemed to be much more introverted than the Americans [Austin Butler]. We had to accept that and work on it. It wasn’t about making them look great with their shirts off, but we wanted a certain dexterous physicality so that they could climb in and out of aircraft and maneuver themselves through constricted areas inside an aircraft fuselage. And to do that, we had to do two things; essentially, we had to limber them up and make them flexible.”
Dye says that at the start, the British actors tended to be better physical performers than the Americans, but the aim was to bring both groups up to the same standard, erasing any national differences in the process.
To do this, Dye deployed two of his favorite exercises: caterpillar push-ups and atomic sit-ups. In the former, you line up as many men as you have in the push-up position, their feet on the shoulders of the man behind. “You have is a long line of bodies that are all connected, then on command, they have to press up. If everybody does it properly, you can get thousands of pounds of meat in the air,” says Dye.
In the atomic sit-up, recruits lock legs and arms together, needing to rise as one. Both exercises teach teamwork as well as being great for your abs and, in the case of atomic sit-ups and your hips. One weak link in either chain ruins the exercise.
“What we find there is that leaders will emerge; they'll start counting down their group to get everybody to come up,” says Dye. “So they’re invaluable in teaching the power of the team.”
One foot, then the otherWith the group starting to think like a unit, Dye compounded the gains by making them run. And run some more. “Running is a really simple demonstration of the power of a group,” says Dye. “I make them listen to their foot strides, the boom, boom, boom. The rhythm picks up, and suddenly, you physically feel the power of that unit coming down the road. And that's another great lesson. Once they have that, we begin to move them in formation. They begin to move more fluidly, which American soldiers tend to do more than British soldiers.”
Another team event saw the actors divide into two groups and pass a mock 500-lb bomb down the line, competing to be the first group to fuse it.
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Later, a curveball in the training came when one of the show’s directors wandered over and said to Dye, “Well, you know these are Americans, so in their spare time they’d be playing baseball and American football.”
Dye gathered some sports equipment. The results were as he’d expected. “Everybody wanted to play rugby or cricket. I said, No, you have to learn the American baseball system. It was fun seeing the guy who expected a cricket bat to actually pick up an American baseball bat and try to hit the ball. They had to learn to throw an American football. I mean, it’s different to a rugby ball, but the Brits loved it.”
The workoutWhen they weren’t playing sports, the recruits enjoyed 90-minute physical therapy sessions consisting of Dye’s tried and tested formula of sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups from a dead hang, and jumping jacks followed by a three-mile run.
If you want to train like Callum Turner and company, try the below, working through as many reps as possible for one minute per exercise. If you still have gas in the tank after the run, do it again. Dead hang pull-upsAs it says on the tin. Hang from the bar with your arms extended. Contract your shoulder blades to power your chin over the bar. Lower and repeat.
Push-upsGet down on your front with your palms and toes touching the ground. Bend at the elbows, keeping your arms flush with your side. Your chin and chest should kiss the ground. Extend your arms to power yourself up again.
Sit-upsGet your feet against a wall or under your squat mate’s feet, then engage the core to bring your upper body up to your knees. If you like, you can add a twist at the top before slowly lowering your back to the ground.
Jumping JacksStand straight, then jump, kicking your legs and arms out at your sides in the air before landing straight again.
Three-mile runPray for the best.
Watch Masters of the Air on Apple TV on Friday nights
Tom Ward is a UK-based journalist and author. He has reported on spelunking microbiologists, the quest to dive to the bottom of the Arctic ocean, torturous ultramarathons in the Mojave desert and Tennessee backwoods, Brexit preppers, Edmund Hillary’s search for the Yeti, and one company’s international quest for quiet. ‘The... Read moreXRelated Stories for GQStrength training