ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Murder Company star William Moseley about the new World War II movie that takes place during D-Day. Directed by Shane Dax Taylor, the film also stars Pooch Hall, Gilles Marini, Joe Anderson, and Kelsey Grammer. Maverick Film & Complex Corp releases the movie in select theaters, digital, and on demand today.
“In the midst of the D-Day invasion, a group of US soldiers are given orders to smuggle a member of the French resistance behind enemy lines to assassinate a high-value Nazi target,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Murder Company opens with you hanging upside down. Is there any movie trickery, or were you really just suspended upside down for several takes?
William Moseley: I was really suspended upside down by what was essentially the ex-Bulgarian Secret Service guide, who basically just had me strung up from the trees hanging upside down. But you know what’s funny? I always love doing those scenes. Like, I love fight scenes, action scenes, stunt scenes. I just think there’s so much fun to do and when do you get to do stuff like that in real life? So yeah, I actually really enjoyed it. But it was for real.
I really enjoy your character in Murder Company because he’s certainly growing into being a leader for his group, but he’s very resistant to that idea. What did you like about that back and forth that Southern faces there?
Yeah, I felt that Southern was really a guy who was fairly inexperienced, thrown into a very, very difficult circumstance. Essentially when he’s sent his orders by his commanding officer, I wanted the audience to feel like this was almost an impossible task and the fact that he and these guys really may not make it through.
I wanted the audience to know that there was real danger ahead. So when he kind of finds himself, he finds his inner strength, he finds his responsibility and his drive to look after these guys around him that the audience is on that journey with him. He might make it, he might not, but he’s doing his best, and through that, he will hopefully make it work.
The timing is so interesting too, because this is, this takes place right around D-Day and concurrently to that, and that is such an iconic moment in World War II. So to be telling this side story that ties into D-Day, what was most interesting about that historical element to Murder Company?
Yeah, I mean, that’s a really good point you bring up, and I was gonna mention that, obviously, this is the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. I would’ve been interested to know where these guys, which beach they would’ve probably been sent to near France. But it was a responsibility, and lots of people have family members who died during World War II. Lots of people know people who were affected.
Personally, my grandfather, my mom’s father, was a paratrooper, airborne division, and my other, my dad’s dad, was in the planes bombing the Japanese during World War II. His plane actually went down, and he almost died. So it’s very important that when you play these characters, you play them to the best of your ability. You don’t take a soft shortcut where you could. You just wanna take a fall if you have to take a fall. If you have to take a hit, take a hit. Like if it makes it look more real, that’s what is best for the movie. So I tried to bring as much of my personal relationship to World War II that I could to this film.
You mentioned that personal connection with your family. Is that what really drew you to Murder Company?
Yeah, it really was. Specifically, the fact that my grandfather was in Paris. He literally landed in Dresden. He was in Dresden for a while. He was stationed there. I remember him talking about how rough, tough, and mean it was. It was really not an easy time.
My other grandfather would talk to me… I don’t wanna go too graphic into detail, but my other grandfather would talk about when he was bombing the Japanese. The Americans were landing on the shoreline, and he said, you would look out of the plane, and you would see a sea of red along the beach where these guys were just getting shot to death. It was just a sea of blood essentially all up the coast. It is just a horrific image.
So it’s very important that people remember that this was not that long ago. This was 80 years ago. It’s very important that we remember where we come from, what our background is, what our history is, and how lucky we are to have the freedom we have today.
That’s a great point, and Murder Company doesn’t go about glamorizing it either. You have some really good lines throughout this film. The one that really stuck with me was, “You really think God wants any part of this?” Can you speak to the film’s portrayal of war? Sometimes, these action movies can almost fetishize violence, but this film does not go that route.
I think it’s very important to mention Shane Taylor, our director. Shane was very clear that his vision for the film was that this was a group of guys thrown into a very, very difficult circumstance. To talk with Shane, like he’s a sports guy. Shane is a guy who works for ESPN. He knows everything there is to know about sports. I think he kind of saw these guys like they were a sports team going up against another sports team.
I don’t think Shane wanted to glamorize what it’s like in war at all. He wanted you to feel the camaraderie, the connection. These guys have the connection that they would give up their lives for each other, but he also wanted the audience to understand that this was real danger and that anybody could die at any given moment.
One of the aspects of the film I also enjoyed was just the comradery of the troops and the interplay between them. You and Pooch Hall have some really fun scenes with each other. How was it working with him?
I loved working with Pooch. Pooch worked with John Voight and Pooch would always tell me stories about what John Voight was like and what a great guy he was, and how he loved working with him. He worked with Liev Schreiber as well. Pooch has worked with some really fantastic actors, and he’s a very, very experienced person.
On top of that, Pooch is very good at finding the comedy and the lightness in a scene and the ease of a scene to then turn it into the darkness of a scene as well. He has a brilliant mind, actually. So I hope going forward Pooch starts writing and directing because he really has the mind for it. I think that’s where we connected the most was on the level that he’s a filmmaker as much as maybe Shane is.
Another cool aspect of this movie, uh, in mo this types of film is just seeing all the, the elements of the forties, the old weapons, the uniforms. What was your favorite aspect of really getting into that time period?
Yeah, I think for me the most important part of getting into that time period was the language. People didn’t speak quite the same as they did today. Obviously, I was playing an American, so it was important for me that I gave like a forties feel to the character. A forties American feel. A Midwestern guy who lives out in the middle of nowhere, has not really been outside of his own state, and has definitely not traveled abroad.
So, he’s wide-eyed and we tried to add a lot of little things in here and there, like improvisational things where we were talking about like which baseball team had won or who movie stars were. So we tried to bring the audience into the time period as much as we could through the language, and I tried to do it also with the accent.
You were in another war movie I really enjoyed recently, Medieval with Ben Foster. What stood out about that experience? Because that’s a very different movie than this.
Yeah, it is a very different film. You know, I loved making Medieval that was actually made in the Czech Republic, and we made, uh, med company in Bulgaria. I was very grateful to work with Ben because I, I’ve always loved him as an actor, you know, he is very good in Hell or High Water, and he’s just known to be one of the sort of best actors around right now. So when I got the chance to play his brother, I just like jumped at the opportunity.
I loved the director on that film. He’s just the most wonderful person. It was a very important story to the Czech people about Jan Žižka, who obviously was one of only five generals to never lose a battle. He may have lost his eye, but he never lost a battle. So I loved making that film, and similarly, with the camaraderie, I loved the guys on it. We were all in the gym at night together, and Magnus Samuelsson, former World’s Strongest Man, was teaching me how to do a proper bench press and stuff like that. So it was great.
You had a very memorable run with The Royals, where you played Prince Liam for four seasons. You’ve mostly done movies, so I was curious what really stood out about just being the same character for such an extended amount of time because that’s relatively unique in your career.
Yeah, I really enjoyed The Royals because I liked to develop the character and I really thought Mark Schwahn’s writing was excellent. He developed the characters really, really well, and he adapted them to our personalities.
I think Mark realized I wanted to make the character probably a bit more serious on The Royals than in the first season. Like, I dunno whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I wanted to embrace the drama, embrace the pain in the character, embrace the edge of his personality, that his dad’s dead and he’s gonna fight and he’s gonna get revenge. I wanted that to come through, and I wanted to play that part. So Mark wrote a really fantastic arc for me.
Obviously I was really disappointed that we didn’t wrap the show up properly. Like, I didn’t feel, but those things are out of an actor’s hands. You can only do what you’re asked to do. I was very grateful for the run of the show. I mean, audiences have loved it, and I’ve met lots of people who have seen it and really enjoyed it.
Thanks to William Moseley for talking about Murder Company, which is now playing.
