Pat McAfee Makes His Acting Debut in 'The Mosquito Bowl' With Help From Bradley Cooper and Tom Cruise

Pat McAfee has moved from his ESPN show and his analyst role on College GameDay to the big screen, making his acting debut as a Marine drill instructor in Peter Berg’s sports war drama The Mosquito Bowl. The Hollywood Reporter said he walked the carpet at the film’s AFI Fest premiere in Los Angeles on Thursday and explained how the part came together. He appears with Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgard, Ray Nicholson and Tom Francis.

The film follows the real-life story of four star college football players who join the Marines after Pearl Harbor and, before they head into battle, play a football game that goes down in history as the Mosquito Bowl. McAfee traced the offer to a 2024 College GameDay visit by Timothée Chalamet, which he said brought Hollywood attention while the movie was casting. That day, McAfee was on television cheering for the Georgia Bulldogs.

“I got a call like the next day that was like, ‘Excuse me, we were wondering if you would like to be a D.I. in the movie The Mosquito Bowl,’” he told The Hollywood Reporter. He said the idea left him “a bit overwhelmed.” He then spent a week at the Marine Corps recruit training site in Parris Island, South Carolina, to immerse himself in the role.

McAfee had not seen the finished film before the premiere. “I was scared to death, and I still have no idea how I did in there so I’m excited to watch it,” he said. The comment sat alongside a broader admission that acting had not been a path he expected to take.

Ari Emanuel, whose TKO owns the WWE, where McAfee makes occasional appearances, “saw something in me,” McAfee said. Emanuel asked whether he would be open if roles or situations came along. McAfee’s answer was “You got it.”

He told The Hollywood Reporter it “had not really been something I thought I’d be good at” and was not something he was “super interested in.” Work on the movie changed that view. “I’ve fallen in love with the entire craft,” he said. “It was the honor of a lifetime to be asked, and I left no stone unturned trying to crush it for them and hopefully I did.”

Berg said he initially questioned whether McAfee could take the role seriously because of his busy ESPN schedule. On top of time with Marine recruits and drill instructors, the director said McAfee went looking for acting advice from people already in the business. Berg described that outreach as an effort to put on a good face for him.

“He got secret acting coaching from Bradley Cooper, that’s an inside scoop,” Berg said, adding that McAfee also went to Tom Cruise. Berg recalled asking where the detailed questions were coming from. McAfee named Cooper and Cruise. “He wanted to learn how to do it and he did,” Berg said.

The movie marks a reteaming of Berg and Buzz Bissinger, who are cousins. Berg adapted Bissinger’s book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream for television, an early success for the pair. In 2022 Bissinger wrote The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II, a project The Hollywood Reporter said touched a nerve because both of their fathers were Marines.

Galitzine said war movies have long been an industry staple, but he found something distinct in this script because the young men were real college football stars and the story carried “a strong sense of heart.” Nicholson, identified by The Hollywood Reporter as the 34-year-old son of Jack Nicholson, said he wrote Berg a letter “basically begging” to be in the film and had been looking to add a war movie to his resume.

Nicholson described the bond in such stories as one in which, at a certain point, “flag fades away and you’re fighting for the man next to you,” a connection he said cannot be found anywhere else. Looking at his castmates, he added, “I love these guys, I think about them every single day.” The Mosquito Bowl opens in theaters on Oct. 30 and begins streaming on Netflix on Nov. 25.