John Magaro interview: ‘September 5’
Twenty years ago, John Magaro was an aspiring actor who had just moved to New York when he got a call about being a background actor in Munich, Steven Spielberg‘s historical drama about the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis.
“Mainly it was sitting around in like a community center in Brooklyn, and then the ADs come in and they’re like, ‘Hey, you, you, you come over here.’ We’re walking on the street, walk across the street, past Eric Bana, and don’t f— it up. And that was my start. You can see my younger version of myself walking across the street from Eric Bana,” Magaro tells Gold Derby. “Eric Bana and I ended up working together on this movie that a lot of people haven’t seen called The Finest Hours, this Disney movie, and I never mentioned that [to him]. I never mentioned that I had walked across the street from him many years before that. … I tend to go with don’t bring it up. Just, you know, keep it [to yourself].”
Nearly two decades later, Magaro received the script for a starring role in September 5, which is about the same tragic event but told in a completely different way. Munich focused on Mossad’s response after Palestinian militant group Black September’s attack on the Israeli Olympic team resulted in the deaths of 11 members. The Golden Globe-nominated September 5, directed and co-written by Tim Fehlbaum, tells the story from the perspective of the ABC Sports crew, never leaving the studio, after the team shifted gears to cover a live hostage crisis it had no experience in covering that — thanks to satellite innovation for the Olympics — was broadcast to a global audience of 900 million.
“What intrigued me about it was that it was an entirely new perspective and really taught me stuff that I didn’t even realize. I liked the idea that it was an examination of journalism, an examination of how — I mean, God, look what’s happened in the last three days,” Magaro says, referring to the terrorist attack in New Orleans. “Every day there’s a tragedy and it’s shoved in our face in sometimes a sensational way. And this incident in Munich in’72 was kind of the roots of all this sensational 24-hour news cycle, how tragedies are relayed to us as consumers of news. That was more the more intriguing view of it as opposed to this geopolitical story of crises and revenge or anything like that. I like that sort of academic approach to it.”
Magaro plays Geoffrey Mason, a young producer who suddenly finds himself calling the shots of a historic broadcast. To prep for the role, the actor met with the real Mason and shadowed producers in control rooms. “That language of calling a show is so specific and I’ve been saying it’s almost like learning an instrument or like learning to conduct an orchestra in a way,” he says. “It’s a very specific technical skill and anyone who’s been in those rooms can see through it.” He practiced calling a show at home and in his hotel room for a week before filming began when he was stricken with COVID. “I had my headset and I would just put on like soccer games and whatever sports I could get and just play with the headset and call the shows. I really love American football, I love basketball, and the Olympics as well. It’s totally changed the way I view them. And for the better, it’s much more interesting and even more exciting now.”
Magaro, who currently stars on Paramount+ with Showtime’s The Agency, also has a new appreciation for commercial breaks. While commercial breaks feel “like an eternity” to viewers at home, they go by in a flash in the room as producers are forced to make quick, sometimes difficult decisions without the chance to give further thought. In the film, Mason and his superiors, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), wrestle with journalistic and moral questions, like whether they can show someone getting shot on live TV and if they should report that the remaining hostages are freed without a second source. In the latter case, Arledge pushes for the report while Bader cautions that they need to wait for a second confirmation because this isn’t a competition. Caught between his two mentors, Mason gives anchor Jim McKay the go-ahead to report with the Arledge-coined caveat “as we’re hearing.” Moments later, they learn (from two sources) that the hostages have all died.
“You want to be kind of the first out the gate at times to do something innovative, and at times you maybe don’t think of the cost of that,” Magaro says. “There was an innocence in a way. They were ordinary people thrown into an extraordinary situation. They’re sports broadcasters who were covering news from an innocent perspective, never having done this, never having had a broadcast like this shared globally via satellite, trying to come up with terms to call these people that never existed. ‘Terrorists,’ which is such a loaded term nowadays, and if you talk to Geoff or any of these people in that room, it wasn’t an indictment. It wasn’t as weighted then. It’s just they had no idea what to call them and you know, they’re like, ‘Well, German TV is calling them that, so let’s just go with that.’ And it wasn’t thought of the consequences of what this is going to mean and that this is kind of brushing over an entire group of people and painting an entire culture with one brush. There was no time to think.”
Maybe in hindsight, he adds, “they would have given it a little more attention and care and sensitivity, but on that day, it was just do your job, stay on the air, keep the story going. ‘Do we show someone being shot on live TV? What are the limits? What is our responsibility?’ And they did the best they could with a very limited perspective. It was like a submarine. It’s like the cameras, their periscope, they’re looking out and they’re trying to make history-changing decisions from just a pinhole, and I think they did the best they could with what they had.”
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The relentless pace of the 22-hour ordeal also means there’s no time or energy for a debrief after it’s all over when everyone’s in shock and numb. In one of the final scenes, Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), the German interpreter Mason sends into the field, returns to the studio. The original scene between her and Mason, which was filmed early in production, was scripted to be much longer, in which Marianne “was, like, narrating the entire German experience.” The actors and Fehlbaum later revisited the scene and had a two-hour discussion about the proper way to encapsulate the story and message without spelling it out for the audience and risking authenticity. The scene was cut way down, with a defeated Marianne merely saying that Germany has failed again.
“Going back to my conversations with Geoff, there was no time even on that day for them to really analyze what had happened. That’s something that you have maybe 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road. It wasn’t happening on that day,” Magaro says. “We came to a place that made sense and we shot it. Tim, a couple of days later, watched the dailies of it and he was so thankful we did this kind of difficult work to get it there because it was exactly what he wanted and it was exactly how we felt right about appropriately playing it. And it was a genuine collaboration. And although it was one of the hardest scenes, it’s, for me, one of my favorite scenes [to watch] because you feel that truthfulness of it.”
Magaro, whose upcoming films include Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Bride! (a reunion with Sarsgaard) and The Mastermind (a reunion with his First Cow and Showing Up director Kelly Reichardt), used to start his days by watching the news and would sometimes leave it on all day. He stopped doing so after filming September 5 two years ago — and he hopes everyone who watches it will also think twice about their media consumption.
“I woke up this morning and I was dealing with my daughter and stuff. And my wife doesn’t really watch news — not like how I did — and she had the news on and I was like, ‘Why are you watching the news?’ And she’s like, ‘I don’t know, I just wanted to put it on.’ And we were going through all the stations and we’re we’re just kind of like, ‘It’s so awful, this 24-hour — all these stations.’ So then we went to Reuters and we’re like, ‘It’s still tough to watch.’ It’s really difficult. I’d much prefer reading it and limiting it,” he says. “It’s just changed my perspective on it, and I think, for a lot healthier, a lot less anxiety-inducing. I think there’s a nature in people to just want to be angry watching it and watching the news or want to get that anxiety, that feeling, and it doesn’t help us make better decisions. So I hope when people watch this, they maybe reevaluate their own consumption of that kind of tragedy and news.”
