For the lad-laden ensemble cast of Apple’s upcoming World War II drama series Masters of the Air, filming began with basic training: They went to a mock boot camp led by Dale Dye, a military veteran and a veteran consultant for military-centric Hollywood projects, to engage in communal exercise, lectures about the mechanics of fighter jets and real-life missions that were flown, and period-accurate bomb-handling tutorials.
“It started with marching, and really making sure that we were all in sync,” says Raff Law, who plays Sergeant Ken Lemmons in the series. “Within three days I basically knew 60 people’s names and something about each of them. We all just spent so much time together.”
For 27-year-old Rafferty Law—the eldest son of Jude Law and Sadie Frost—the series has also been a crash course in How to Become a Hollywood Actor 101. Masters of the Air was produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks as a spiritual successor to Band of Brothers and The Pacific, squaring it up for the pathos-filled pantheon of blockbuster combat ensemble dramas. A high-octane project with a $200 million-plus budget, it’s centered on the Air Force squadron of the 100th Bomb Group (“the Bloody Hundredth”) as they lead bombing raids over Nazi Germany. Its cast is stacked with Hollywood’s next generation of leading men, including Austin Butler, Barry Keoghan, and Callum Turner.
In the days leading up to this week’s Los Angeles premiere, Law’s just been trying to keep a level head: hitting the gym, cooking at home with his girlfriend (lately they’ve been experimenting with making their own lentil tofu), and, he says, “reminding myself of the experience of shooting Masters and trying to put myself back into the shoes of two years ago. And just trying to keep calm and not really get overexcited.”
For Law, the experience has been grounding, quite literally: his character, Sgt. Lemmons, is a mechanic who worked on the planes but didn’t actually fly them. He shares a few scenes with Butler and Turner, and none with Keoghan (“although me and Barry are pretty good friends now, having met just before we started filming”). His main priority was getting into the mechanic’s headspace “of guilt and blaming yourself when missions didn’t go to plan.”
“Because I was on the ground the whole time, I couldn’t see what was going up in the air,” Law says. “Something for me throughout boot camp [was] that I really had to get my head round was the fact that I wasn't flying these missions. I’m very lucky that the part that I get to play is a kind of story that in some ways hasn’t always been told, which is the people who are on the ground, the people who are behind the scenes putting in work throughout the night without any sleep to make sure that these things can happen.”
His process also meant honing Lemmons’s Arkansas accent—not an easy feat for a Londoner who shares not only his famous dad’s curls and blue eyes but also his quintessentially British tone. Though he tried to stay in character between takes, about two weeks into filming he slipped up while a crew member was setting up his microphone. “I started speaking about football in an English accent and the guy who was micing me up was like, ‘I thought you were from America,’” he recalls, triumphant. “And I was like, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I want to hear.’”
Next up is the Masters of the Air premiere in London, where Law will be joined by his mom, whom he lived with during filming—“she really saw the effort and the work that went in throughout it all, so I know she’s really, really excited to see it,” he says—as well as his grandfather and little brother. Everything feels like it’s happening right on schedule.
“I’m 27. I’m at a place where I really feel like my career’s starting off in a really positive way,” he shares. “I’m really happy that I took the time in my late teens and early 20s to really figure myself out and understand what it takes to give it everything.”
