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If you were in a pub a few years ago and overheard a broad Arkansas accent shouting at the TV, it might well have been Raff Law.
The young British actor was prepping to play Sergeant Ken Lemmons in Masters of the Air, and working hard to get the real-life veteran's southern drawl down. “I just stayed in accent for like a month before filming,” says Law over Zoom from Los Angeles. “I'd be at home going to the shops, ordering in an Arkansas accent, in a taxi, chatting to friends, watching football matches.”
He did it so well he’s since been dubbed an honorary Lemmons by the Lemmons family. According to Law, his Lemmons – in his early twenties and already critical to getting B-17 bombers ready to fly, mission after mission – is the face of “the anticipation and the waiting and then [pain] when the planes weren't coming back”.
Law calls episode four Ken’s big “hero moment,” fixing up the plane flown by Austin Butler’s Buck Cleven as it taxis and trying very hard not to get crushed to death at the same time. We asked him to break down Ken’s biggest scenes so far and tell us what they mean for the rest of the series.
Talk us through that sequence where you commando roll out of the wheel well of a B-17.
Initially there were talks about getting a stunt guy in, health and safety and all these things, but I was like: this is my best moment in the script! I want to be able to give Ken his moment, I'm doing it, definitely.
Luckily I'd done some parkour training a few years before. The roll was the thing that I'd mastered – I wasn't great at doing flips or anything, but I was good at doing a roll. So I was showing the stunt guys, And they were like: okay, but it's on the concrete hardstand you're going 30/40 miles per hour that way and you've got to jump this way. Not only that, they've got a big wheel that's going to come behind you. So you've got to get out of the way of that wheel, otherwise you will be crushed. We initially started on a golf buggy on the hardstand and I’d jump off. I had shoulder pads on. We practiced it slower and then we sped it up and sped it up. We shot that scene over two or three days and I did about 30 or 40 rolls, I'd say.
What was funny was that we actually had to make the roll worse, because I think I'd been thinking about it so much and practising – I was kind of rolling off and it looked too easy. So they were like, ‘Raff, just throw yourself off.’ So I ended up throwing myself off.
You’re opposite Austin Butler in that scene. What’s he like to act with?
He brought comfortability and ease. He's very professional. He's very committed and he's very easygoing and he does his thing. There was a day where Austin was on set, Callum [Turner] was there, Anto [Anthony Boyle] was there. Everyone was just very much in their worlds: Austin was doing the kind of Buck Cleven, chill thing, and sitting back and just watching and taking it in, and Callum was being a lot more out there, and Anto was a bit all over the place, as Crosby is in the early episodes. It was just really inspiring and great to be around, just seeing everyone in their world and committing to their decisions.
In that scene, Austin was aware that I was jumping out of the plane a lot, so he was just checking in – like, "you all good?" I said yeah, don't worry about me. I'd say he just brought a real sense of ease. I love working with people that make you feel like you can try anything, or see what happens in the moment. I like working in spontaneous moments, I don't like to be too set before I do something, and and he kind of made me feel comfortable to do that.
Another big moment is Bucky Egan seeing the aftermath of a bombing raid while he’s on leave in London.
Even in that split-second moment, you see the different sides and everything that's going on all around this. Of course, the Eighth Army Air Force were doing precision bombing at nighttime. They were hitting factories. They weren't going after random places in Germany. But these bombs were destructive. And you see the destruction that they can cause. I think it's poignant moments like that, which kind of reminds you how real this is. It's that moment of understanding the brutality and the realness of war, and the consequences of it.
Where is Ken by the end of the episode?
Things start to get a bit more serious. They go on the mission and we only see him in the morning, but he's obviously been up all night trying to fix this prop and this magneto. So he's absolutely shattered. But he is going to do anything to make sure that that plane can fly, which really shows his commitment. That's a really big moment for Ken. And then we see the downside, when Buck doesn't return and Ken’s left full of guilt. I think this is a real moment of: are we going to even win this war? Cleven was the knight in shining armour. And he's not coming back.
