Real soldiers act in Navy SEALs movie

Washington - An upcoming movie will star a real team of Navy SEALs, performing covert operations and staging surprising assaults.

‘Act of Valor,’ which is due out on February 24, began as a recruiting video for the SEALs and while the plot is fictional, the action scenes are as close to the truth as one can come.

Scenes of high-impact surprise assaults are all based on real life missions.

“Very strange to go from real world missions where the consequences are as high as there can be in anything in the world to one where you get to walk away from it,” ABC News quoted Lt Commander Rorke, who stars in the film as saying.

Only first names of the seals are being revealed in the movie.

Rorke has been a SEAL for 13 years, and his experiences with his fellow SEALs offer a firsthand look into how these stealthy commandos operate.

In one scene, the SEALs are preparing to grab a hostage and move silently underwater, unseen, until they are ready to make a move.

“Anytime we’d go to film something there’d be a pre-existing training opportunity that we’re doing with regular Navy aircraft service vessels, subservice vessels and so on,” Rorke said.

Filmmakers Scott Waugh and Mike “Mouse” McCoy spent two years working around SEAL deployments in order to get the real guys in their movie.

“These men are so complex, such a complexity of character, that it would be really hard for an actor to authentically portray them and it would be better to see if we could just get the real guys to do it,” Waugh said.

“You’re going to see some things in this film and you’re going to say, ‘no way that guy goes through that,’ but it actually happened, so we didn’t create any fantasy elements there,” McCoy added.

Being portrayed in an unrealistic fashion was a deal breaker for the SEALs. They said if they were going to star in a movie, they wanted control over scenes they thought had gone too Hollywood.

“The fact of the matter is, there’s certainly plenty of swearing in the teams but in a mission, it’s a lot more calm and collected, and disciplined.

“So in ‘Act of Valor,’ you’re going to see during a gun fight, very calm and tempered communication and that’s the way it really happens,” Lt Commander Rorke said.

Rorke said he and his fellow SEALs didn’t need a lot of extra coaching in acting out their roles.

For an extra shot of danger and adrenaline, the SEALs wanted and got permission to use live ammunition in their weapons, a first in nearly 75 years.