“Ike Eisenhower smoked 4 packs of tobacco a day and drank coffee buckets”

“Ike Eisenhower smoked four packs of tobacco a day and drank coffee buckets,” he told Lusa Brendan Fraser in an interview about the new film by Anthony Maras. “I didn’t do this, but I did my best to imitate what I thought I would do.”. 

The actor read books and heard podcasts about this historical figure, a task he considered challenging. “I have the attention of a clown fish, so I removed the most important things I could use,” he explained.

“D-Day: Under Pressure” tells the true story of the 72 hours when the day of the Normandy landing was decided in 1944, following weather forecasts. The bar was high: if there was a storm, the attack would be unsuccessful and the war lost. But if the allied forces waited too long, the plans would be discovered by the Nazis. 

This decision fell to Eisenhower, who received contradictory predictions when he asked several weathermen, led by James Stagg (played by Andrew Scott). 

It weighed on his conscience the tragedy of Operation Tiger, a military exercise to prepare the invasion of Normandy that had gone horribly bad just six weeks before. 749 soldiers died due to a failure of communication at sea and friendly fire, something the actor did not know and a little known incident, which was only disqualified in the nineties. 

Now he was about to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers “to what could be compared to a punch fight against a chainsaw, with a bad weather forecast that could delay everything,” said Brendan Fraser. 

The historical context of Eisenhower's life before arriving on the eve of the Day D was important for the actor to embody the general at one of the most decisive moments in history. He graduated from the military academy at West Point in 1917, aspired to serve in World War I, but the conflict ended before he could.

“ Interestingly, during the next forty years of his career, he was an excellent strategist, a good communicator and a diplomat, and this led him to the status of a four-star general,” said Brendan Fraser. 

“ But he never fired a shot in battle, not once, and he was never in the line of fire,” he said. “So he was a man who believed in his duty and in doing the right thing, but humble because he had no tangible experience.”. 

That's how the hearing finds him as the Supreme Commander and has to make a final decision. “Due to the person with integrity he was, he took it so seriously that he wrote a letter to the world in case of victory in Operation Overlord [Day D], and wrote another in case of defeat,” the actor stressed.

The defeat was never sent because the allies won the war, and much of it is due to the courage of meteorologist James Stagg, who challenged consensus with his bad weather forecasts. 

“ I have a deep respect and appreciation for science, because it was not just deciding how we behave on a given day or whether we wear an umbrella,” Fraser said. “This is an example of a weather forecast that, if it were wrong, would have changed the whole course of our shared human history.”.

“Day D: Under Pressure” is a Focus Features production with Anthony Maras. The film is starring Brendan Fraser and Andrew Scott, with a cast featuring Kerry Condon (Kay Summersby), Damian Lewis (Bernard Montgomery) and Chris Messina (Irving P. Krick).