{"id":655065,"date":"2026-10-23T19:10:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T19:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/655065\/"},"modified":"2026-10-23T19:10:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T19:10:10","slug":"how-pat-mcafee-landed-his-first-acting-role-in-the-mosquito-bowl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/655065\/","title":{"rendered":"How Pat McAfee Landed His First Acting Role in ‘The Mosquito Bowl’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tPat McAfee<\/a> spends plenty of time on camera for his ESPN show and analyst role on College GameDay, but for the first time, he is now on the big screen.<\/p>\n

\n\tMcAfee makes his acting debut in The Mosquito Bowl<\/a>, Peter Berg<\/a>\u2018s new sports war drama that follows the real-life story of four star college football players who join the Marines after Pearl Harbor. Before heading out to battle, they play a football game, dubbed the Mosquito Bowl, that goes down in history. McAfee appears in the movie<\/a> as a Marines drill instructor, appearing alongside stars Nicholas Galitzine<\/a>, Bill Skarsgard<\/a>, Ray Nicholson<\/a> and Tom Francis.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film premiered at Los Angeles\u2019 AFI Fest<\/a> on Thursday, where McAfee walked the carpet and explained just how his movie moment came to be. He told The Hollywood Reporter that when Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet appeared on College GameDay<\/a> in 2024, he brought a lot of Hollywood eyes with him \u2014 at the exact time that Mosquito Bowl was casting and McAfee was hooting and hollering for the Georgia Bulldogs on TV.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI got a call like the next day that was like, \u2018Excuse me, we were wondering if you would like to be a D.I. [drill instructor] in the movie The Mosquito Bowl,\u2019\u201d the sports personality recalled, admitting he was \u201ca bit overwhelmed\u201d by the idea and spent a week at the Marine Corps recruit training site in Parris Island, South Carolina to immerse himself in the role.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI was scared to death, and I still have no idea how I did in there so I\u2019m excited to watch it,\u201d McAfee said, as he had not watched the film ahead of its premiere. He also revealed that Ari Emanuel \u2014 whose TKO owns the WWE, where McAfee makes occasional appearances \u2014 \u201csaw something in me\u201d when it came to acting.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe presented it to me like, \u2018Hey I think you could be an actor, if I find any roles or situations that pop up, would you be OK with that?\u2019 And I go, \u2018You got it.\u2019 It had not really been something I thought I\u2019d be good at, it\u2019s not really something I was super interested in,\u201d but after working on the movie, \u201cI\u2019ve fallen in love with the entire craft,\u201d McAfee said. \u201cIt was the honor of a lifetime to be asked, and I left no stone unturned trying to crush it for them and hopefully I did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tFrom left: Buzz Bissinger, Tom Francis, Ray Nicholson, Pat McAfee, Peter Berg, Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Galitzine and retired Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. James D. Dever at the AFI Fest premiere.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCharley Gallay\/Getty Images for Netflix<\/p>\n

\n\tBerg also gave his take on the casting, as he initially questioned McAfee if he would be able to take the role seriously due to his busy ESPN schedule. On top of working with Marine recruits and drill instructors, the director said that McAfee \u201cgot secret acting coaching from Bradley Cooper<\/a>, that\u2019s an inside scoop,\u201d as well as went to Tom Cruise<\/a> for advice.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe was calling actors that he knew, asking for advice, wanting to put on a good face for me. I was like, \u2018Where did you learn all of these questions, where did you learn all of this stuff?\u2019\u201d Berg continued. \u201cHe was like, \u2018Bradley Cooper, Tom Cruise.\u2019 He wanted to learn how to do it and he did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie<\/a> marks a reteaming between Berg and Buzz Bissinger, who are cousins and had early success when Berg adapted Bissinger\u2019s book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream for TV. In 2022 the author wrote The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II, which touched a nerve as both of their fathers were Marines.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd of tackling the well-trodden World War II genre, Galitzine noted, \u201cWar movies have become a bit of a staple in the industry for the last however long, forever, but there was something unique about the project within the script and the dimension that these young men were real guys who were real college football stars and it just really felt like there was a strong sense of heart within the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNicholson \u2014 the 34-year-old son of Jack Nicholson \u2014 said he wrote Berg a letter \u201cbasically begging\u201d to be a part of the film, and had specifically been looking to add a war movie to his resume. \u201cThe bond and the brotherhood that is caked into movies like this \u2014 at a certain point, flag fades away and you\u2019re fighting for the man next to you and it\u2019s a bizarro bond that you can\u2019t have anywhere else,\u201d he said, looking over at his castmates. \u201cI love these guys, I think about them every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Mosquito Bowl hits theaters Oct. 30 and starts streaming on Netflix on Nov. 25. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pat McAfee spends plenty of time on camera for his ESPN show and analyst role on College GameDay,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[66344,282162,91575,10841,146,2323,85,46,78749,397,102579,75139,249007,267577,1979,267578],"class_list":["post-655065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-afi-fest","tag-afi-fest-2026","tag-bill-skarsgard","tag-bradley-cooper","tag-entertainment","tag-events","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movie-premieres","tag-movies","tag-nicholas-galitzine","tag-pat-mcafee","tag-peter-berg","tag-ray-nicholson","tag-red-carpet","tag-the-mosquito-bowl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}