From their antics on the Warfare press tour, it’s clear that Kit Connor and Will Poulter have become close friends. After all, how many buddies would let you stick your hand in their back pocket and feel enough to guess their underwear brand?
Now, in a new article for Interview Magazine, Connor interviewed Poulter about his whirlwind month of new projects (including Warfare, Black Mirror, Death of a Unicorn, and On Swift Horses), revealing what the two have in common in the process.
For one thing, both Poulter and Connor entered the entertainment industry at a very young age. Poulter’s first project was the 2007 film Son of Rambow, in which he was 14. He followed it the next year with a role in the final Chronicles of Narnia film. Connor, meanwhile, had his first film role in 2014’s Get Santa at just 9 years old.
“Narnia was a big step up in terms of scale and, I guess, pressure,” Poulter recalled. “I was still at school at the time and the majority of my family moved with me. I don’t know whether you felt this when you started, but the naïveté of youth is quite insulating. It’s like, ‘Well, I don’t even really have a concept of the pressure or how many people are going to see this or how big it is, so I’m just going into it in a slightly fearless way.’
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“Yeah, exactly,” Connor agreed. “I had been offered a film that was a really cool job, but I had this massive question mark around it because it meant that I would have to miss out on the big school trip at the end of primary school that I’d been waiting for for years. I ended up having to miss it because I took that job. You look back and you’re like, ‘Wow, what a stupid little kid I was,’ but at the same time, it’s kind of brilliant that I was only doing it because I wanted to do it, instead of, ‘Oh, this is going to be brilliant for my career.’”
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“I’d take my shirt off and see camera flashes from the audience,” Connor said. “There was something quite seedy about that.”
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The duo also, of course, have the shared experience of acting in Warfare, the new Iraq War-set film from director Alex Garland. Poulter said he knew the entire cast would get incredibly close, Connor included, based on his previous experience acting in 2017’s War Machine.
“I was doing the math and I was like, ‘If we’ve got three-and-a-half weeks together, and a shoot that was probably three times the length of what we all did on War Machine, we are going to be like brothers at the end of it,’” Poulter explained. “Cut to now and we’ve all got matching tattoos.”
“You said that to me when we first sat down for a coffee before,” Connor replied. “You told me that story and I thought, ‘Well, it’s only three-and-a-half weeks. How close can we get?’ After a week we were saying, ‘I love you.’”
Warfare is now playing in theaters. Check out the trailer below.
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