The True Story Behind George Clooney’s “The Boys in the Boat”: From Amateur Athletes to Olympic Heroes (Exclusive)

The new historical drama tells the remarkable tale of the University of Washington's underdog crew team

George Clooney knows the story behind The Boys in the Boat sounds stranger than fiction. “If we’d made this up,” he says, “no one would believe it.”

But the odds-defying tale the director tells in his drama, based on Daniel James Brown’s 2013 bestseller of the same name, is historical fact, not Hollywood magic.

As the Great Depression continued its stranglehold on the U.S. in the 1930s, nine University of Washington students — who’d never held an oar — joined the school’s junior varsity crew team.

In just three years, they overcame their own physical weaknesses and bested skilled teams from wealthy colleges, making it all the way to the 1936 Olympics held in Nazi-occupied Germany, where they united Americans behind them as they faced off against the Third Reich’s elite team.

Of the feel-good story, Clooney, 62, quips, “When your bad guys are rich kids and Hitler, you win.”

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At the heart of the saga is the handsome and strapping Joe Rantz, who’d been abandoned by his dad and stepmom when he was a young teen. Despite having hardly any means, Rantz, a resourceful young man, managed to attend the University of Washington but struggled to pay his tuition.

At school he found himself in the same, well, boat as many working-class peers who vied for just eight spots (plus the coxswain) on the JV crew team. What attracted them wasn’t athletic glory: Earning a seat came with a campus job, allowing them to stay in school and afford a cheap place to live.

Making the team was no easy task. “Competitive rowing is an undertaking of extraordinary beauty preceded by brutal punishment,” Brown notes in his book. “Unlike most sports, which draw primarily on particular muscle groups, rowing makes heavy and repeated use of virtually every muscle in the body.”

Hands bleed and callous, muscles tear, oars can snap back and crack a rib. “Pain,” notes Brown, “is part and parcel of the deal.”

But Rantz (played by Fantastic Beasts star Callum Turner, 33, the British heartthrob who’s rumored to be under consideration as the next James Bond) was uniquely qualified for the rigors of the sport, even though he had no crew experience.

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His hardscrabble upbringing forced him into physical labor at a young age: As a boy, he chopped wood for his school’s wood-burning stove and carried heavy trays of food serving miners at a cookhouse. As Brown put it, “Hurting was nothing new to him.”

Not so for Turner, who says the intense preparation was “one of the most grueling experiences” of his life. In February 2022, prior to the start of filming in the U.K., the actors playing the crew team — including Turner, Mare of Easttown’s Jack Mulhern, and New Amsterdam’s Luke Slattery — buckled down for two months of training for four hours per day on the river Thames.

“It’s snowing and we just think, ‘Oh God,’ ” recalls Turner. Even after cameras rolled, they’d train more when Clooney yelled cut each day. (While they sweated it out, Clooney jokes he’d enjoy a “nice pinot.”)

Like the amateur athletes they play, the actors were not skilled initially. “None of us had ever rowed before,” says Turner. And it showed. When Clooney and producing partner Grant Heslov first came to watch the guys in action, “we were awful,” says Turner, adding the director was obviously concerned.

“I could see through Clooney’s smile, there was pain,” he jokes.

Channeling the experience of the real men they portray, the actors worked together on the water and built a bond. “There was this competitive nature to it that spurred each other on,” says Turner. “We all learned this deep connection was the most important part of this journey, and understanding what that was like for these guys who went on and achieved what they did.”

And what the athletes achieved was remarkable. They surpassed the university’s varsity team in skill, and their stoic coach, Al Ulbrickson (portrayed by Joel Edgerton, 49) made the controversial choice to enter the JV team into races — including an Olympic-qualifying regatta.

The “unorthodox” move was "very risky,” explains Brown, who says Ulbrickson’s job was on the line for infuriating university officials.

But not only was Ulbrickson right, the team he coached galvanized Americans — still suffering from economic hardships under the Great Depression — to root for Rantz and his teammates as they succeeded against all expectations.

Related: Joel Edgerton Takes a Collegiate Rowing Team to the Olympics in George Clooney's The Boys in the Boat Trailer

As sportscaster Royal Brougham (played by Chris Diamontapoulos, 48) notes in the movie, everyday citizens saw themselves in the “determined young faces” of the “nine working-class boys” as they made it all the way to the Olympics.

Rantz’s daughter, Judy Willman, says she hopes the boys, including her dad (who later worked as a chemical engineer at Boeing and had five children with his wife Joyce before he died in 2007) serve as an inspiration. “You can choose to be a survivor instead of a victim,” she says.

At the very least, the action on screen has some viewers caught up in the excitement, according to Clooney, who attended a recent screening with his wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.

“My wife and I were in the middle row," he says. "You look at all the people in the cinema, and when we got the last race, they’re rowing in the seats!”

The Boys in the Boat is in theaters Christmas Day.

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