Clint Eastwood Casts Men Who Stopped Train Attack to Star in New Film

Via Billy
 

Airman 1st Class Spencer Stone, Oregon National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos and civilian Anthony Sadler, all childhood friends from California, will star in “The 15:17 to Paris,” a film based on the book they co-wrote about taking down a terrorist, Warner Bros. said in a statement.

The film, which began production this week, follows the lives of the three friends from childhood to the evening when they helped subdue the man who opened fire inside a train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris.

The Sacramento-area men were vacationing in Europe when they tackled Ayoub El-Khazzani, a man who authorities said has ties to radical Islam. El-Khazzani had boarded the Paris-bound train with a Kalashnikov rifle, pistol and box cutter.

Skarlatos told Fox News in May about his famed August 2015 brush with terror in Europe, “I still think about it every day. I get nightmares from time to time.”

Looking back on the terror attack that changed his life, Skarlatos recalled, “It was just kind of a gut response. I guess I was just lucky that I was able to do something and not freeze up. That was the biggest thing I was grateful for because when you think about something like that, you never really know how you’re going to react until you actually do and so I was grateful I didn’t just sit there in shock.”

The film will be the latest of several about real-life heroes that Eastwood has taken on, including 2014′s “American Sniper,” and 2016′s “Sully.” But the leads in those films were played by Oscar-nominee Bradley Cooper and Oscar-winner Tom Hanks, respectively, not their actual subjects.

It’s common to give cameo roles to the subjects of films that don’t require more than a line or two, but this case is nearly unprecedented in recent Hollywood history. There are no reports of the men having any acting experience, though Skarlatos appeared on “Dancing With the Stars” soon after the Paris incident.

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