Pat McAfee Makes Acting Debut in Peter Berg's The Mosquito Bowl

Pat McAfee is now an actor. The sports personality makes his acting debut in The Mosquito Bowl, a Peter Berg war drama, playing a Marines drill instructor, The Hollywood Reporter reported on Thursday.

The film is about four star college football players who join the Marines after Pearl Harbor, the 1941 Japanese attack that drew the United States into the Second World War. It stars Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson and Tom Francis alongside McAfee. Fox News also lists Brent Comer in the cast. The story centres on Marines who play a legendary football game before the battle of Okinawa.

McAfee prepared for the part with a week at the Marine Corps recruit training site at Parris Island, South Carolina, where new recruits go through basic training. Berg told The Hollywood Reporter that McAfee also received acting coaching from Bradley Cooper, and that he sought advice from Tom Cruise. Those lessons came from two of the biggest names in Hollywood, and the coaching was kept quiet.

McAfee told The Hollywood Reporter how he got the role. He said he was asked to join the cast after Timothée Chalamet appeared on College GameDay, the American television show that broadcasts from college campuses on football Saturdays, in 2024.

The film premiered at AFI Fest in Los Angeles, the festival run by the American Film Institute. Its theatrical release, meaning its run in cinemas, is set for October 30. Variety reported that Netflix will then premiere the film on November 25, after its cinema opening. That pattern, cinemas first and streaming weeks later, is common for films that Netflix backs. Netflix has also published an official trailer page for the film on its Tudum fan site.

For McAfee, the route into film ran through a military training base, a campus game-day broadcast and a set of lessons from two of Hollywood's best-known stars. The cinema date is now set, and the streaming date follows it.