In his next film, Only the Brave, the actor combines all that accrued experience for one of his most daunting roles yet: firefighter Chris MacKenzie (“Mac,” as Kitsch calls him), a 30-year-old wildfire specialist who died in the devastating Yarnell Hill blaze that claimed the lives of 19 firefighters in 2013.īased on a harrowing GQ article, Only the Brave, directed by Joseph Kosinski, paints a familial portrait of the 19 “hotshots”-firefighters who are specially trained to tame unforgiving wildfires-who died that day. He’s also, by his count, played at least six real people (including cult leader David Koresh, in the upcoming series Waco). In his most prominent acting roles, the native Canadian has played a Navy Seal ( Lone Survivor), a California detective ( True Detective), and a star football player ( Friday Night Lights), all with a thread of homegrown panache.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.You would be forgiven for thinking Taylor Kitsch is the ultimate all-American guy. And so far, every reaction I’ve gotten from the family members is that we did our job. Of all the opinions on a film, is one that truly matters to me on the deepest level. I believe so wholeheartedly in story being a heroic one, and one that needs to be told.

The reaction so far has been everything I would have hoped and more-which, to me, is almost the most important thing. What kinds of conversations have you had with the loved ones of the real Granite Mountain Hotshots? I just finished the film two weeks ago, so we’re just starting to show it to the family members now. We could only work near it for a short period of time before we’d have to call cut so we could get away and cool down and go back for the next take. The intensity of fire, even at that scale…and then we got into flames that were 20 or 30 feet tall. Even a flame that’s only six or eight feet tall puts off a tremendous amount of heat-enough that other trees or bushes in the same vicinity would erupt into flames just by proximity. The heat generated by wildfire was something that we were all surprised by. What are the unique technical challenges of shooting a movie with live fire? I’ve done explosions before-but I had never done wildfire or forest fire before. “We could only work near it for a short period of time before we’d have to call cut so we could get away and cool down and go back for the next take.

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