The film stars Andrew Scott (‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’), Kerry Condon (‘F1’), Damian Lewis (‘Billions’), Chris Messina (‘Air’), and Academy Award winner Brendan Fraser (‘The Whale’) as Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser about their work on ‘Pressure’. Scott discussed his first reaction to the screenplay, how his research helped inform his performance, and what it was like working opposite Fraser, while Fraser talked about his approach to playing an iconic historical figure like Dwight D. Eisenhower.

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Andrew Scott stars as “Captain James Stagg” in director Anthony Maras’ ‘Pressure’, a Focus Features release. Credit: Alex Bailey/Focus Features/Studiocanal. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

Moviefone: To begin with, Andrew, can you talk about your first reaction to reading David Haig and director Anthony Maras’ screenplay and the way they were able to adapt the true story it is based on, and Haig’s stage play for the screen?

Andrew Scott: I just thought it was incredibly original. I’d never thought about the weather in relation to D-Day. I think that’s one of the interesting things in talking about the movie is that everyone’s like, “Oh, wow. Yeah, of course.” But everybody has a relationship with weather. I don’t think we have necessarily an expertise about weather, and I think it’s wonderful to be able to see these very brilliant people do their jobs expertly, particularly given the enormous stakes of the situation. I thought the story was written with real wit and real humanity so that you have this chamber piece almost where everybody’s in these war rooms, and then you see this enormous expanse visually. So, to me, it seemed deeply cinematic, and I loved this central character of James Stagg and how surprising and inspiring a man he was.

(L to R) Brendan Fraser as “General Dwight D. Eisenhower”, Andrew Scott as “Captain James Stagg” and Kerry Condon as “Captain Kay Summersby” in director Anthony Maras’ ‘Pressure’, a Focus Features release. Credit: Alex Bailey/Focus Features/Studiocanal. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

MF: Can you talk about your approach to playing James Stagg, and did you do any research that really helped inform your performance?

AS: I spoke to Anthony quite a lot at the beginning about what I wanted to do. I think he isn’t a big name that we’ve heard like Eisenhower so he’s without power, that he’s a man who’s drafted in. He’s got no war experience whatsoever, but he’s still formidable, but it’s a very particular type of strength that he has. So, I wanted to make sure that with the audience, we weren’t trying to ingratiate. He wasn’t trying to ingratiate himself with the people around him and nor should I as an actor try to ingratiate myself with an audience to make him likable or accessible. I don’t necessarily think that’s what an audience wants. I think sometimes audiences slightly mistrust that so actually you’re listening to what he’s saying rather than how he’s saying it, to some degree, and that hopefully, like with any great cinematic character, the journey from A to Z is exactly that rather from A to C so that by the end of the story you go, this guy is actually very vulnerable and very human. He’s just decided to prioritize his job and his duty for the greater good.

(L to R) Brendan Fraser as “General Dwight D. Eisenhower” and Andrew Scott as “Captain James Stagg” in director Anthony Maras’ ‘Pressure’, a Focus Features release. Credit: Alex Bailey/Focus Features/Studiocanal. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

MF: Can you also talk about Stagg’s working relationship with Eisenhower and what it was like creating that on screen with Brendan?

AS: I think it’s just that they were so culturally and physically and psychologically different to each other, and we were quite spare in depicting them together as two people. There are not many scenes of them where it’s just the two of them and that pressure increases. It’s the idea of an alliance really, the idea that it’s easy to make an alliance with somebody who’s culturally and seemingly very similar to you. What’s more courageous is to have an alliance with people that are a little bit different to us and some of those parts are the things that make the whole, and in this case genuinely change the course of history.

Brendan Fraser stars as “General Dwight D. Eisenhower” in director Anthony Maras’ ‘Pressure’, a Focus Features release. Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features/Studiocanal. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

MF: Finally, Brendan, can you talk about your approach to playing a character as iconic as Eisenhower and did you learn anything from your research that really helped your performance?

Brendan Fraser: The advantage I had was that our culture and our society of films and history doesn’t automatically give us a real clear perception of who Ike Eisenhower was during the war years. I mean, if I were to tell you think of Patton or think of MacArthur, you’d have an automatic image. For me, the edges are fuzzy. So that allowed me a way to fill that out and clarify the type of leader he was, one who cared intensely for his troops, who never lost sight of why they were fighting this war and certainly not the ramifications of going into battle. As icons go, I started at the beginning. I learned that he graduated top of his class from West Point. He wanted to go into the first World War, but it had concluded by the time he graduated. In subsequent years, he was promoted for being an excellent strategist, and an excellent diplomat. That just tells me that he was an all-around excellent communicator. He was a good guy and he cared about those troops. I’m pretty sure it’s palpable. You need only look at the file photos of the 101st before they shipped out that afternoon. The press pool tells us that yes, he was talking about fly-fishing to them because it was a passion of his. They talked about cars. They talked about their girlfriends back home, and their moms. He looked them in the eye, and he asked them their names and it showed it wasn’t an affectation. He genuinely was concerned for their wellbeing in the face of knowing the odds of survival, the grim statistics that he did. Also, take into consideration that six weeks prior to D-Day, on April 28th and 29th, Operation Tiger, an exercise that was to simulate the landing on Utah Beach on a similar beach in England went horribly awry due to a miscommunication at sea. The soldiers weren’t given a stand down command, and they stormed the beach into their own live fire. It’s one of the most tragic friendly fire incidents in military history. You tell me that that could not have weighed heavily on the mind of Ike Eisenhower when he was going into D-Day on that weekend. Then he gets the weather report that it’s going to be very bad, and they won’t be able to land. They won’t be able to hit targets. It will delay everything by two to three weeks to wait for the cycle of the moon to go through. All that calculus had to have been done that prior weekend wherein the world of our film takes place. The imaginings of those conversations are what we bring to the screen. As far as historical and factual accuracy go, every effort has been made to maintain, that I promise you. This is Focus Features, and this is what they do. The arithmetic of all that knowledge is important to an extent, but what is most important is that we understand the very human face behind the decisions that were made and why. The understanding of why that generation signed up, went to war to end tyranny and fascism and knowing the stakes that they did. Why they did that, and who we are today, you and I and everyone would be living vastly different lives if at all in a world where they failed. It can’t be argued otherwise. So, there is a level of appreciation that I learned from researching this, from working with the experts that I did, from playing the part, seeing the movie in the end, and learning the script. Just appreciating that, and I contrast that modern thinking in 1944 with our modern thinking now. It poses the eternal question, why? Why are we even doing this at all? The answer is to be told, but if past is prologue, we should be cautioned.

‘Pressure’ opens in theaters on May 29th.

What is the plot of ‘Pressure’?

In the tense 72 hours before D-Day, and with the fate of the free world hanging in the balance, ‘Pressure’ follows General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) and Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott) as they face an impossible choice: launch the largest and most dangerous seaborne invasion in history or risk losing the war altogether.

Who is in the cast of ‘Pressure’?

• Andrew Scott as James Stagg
• Brendan Fraser as Dwight D. Eisenhower
• Kerry Condon as Kay Summersby
• Chris Messina as Irving P. Krick
• Damian Lewis as Bernard Montgomery
• Henry Ashton as John Eisenhower
• Con O’Neill as Trafford Leigh-Mallory
• Daniel Quinn-Toye as Michael Gregory
• Toby Williams as Bryant
• Max Croes as Private Eugene Shaw
• Roseanna Brown as Operator

Brendan Fraser stars as “General Dwight D. Eisenhower” in director Anthony Maras’ ‘Pressure’, a Focus Features release. Credit: Alex Bailey/Focus Features/Studiocanal. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

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