Charles Melton seems to be starting a new tradition.
After getting matching tattoos with Elizabeth Yu and Gabriel Chung, the actors who played his children in May December, he now has one with his fellow Warfare costars.
During a video interview for EW’s latest cover story on the intense film about an Iraq War battle and the Navy SEALs who lived it, Melton, along with Kit Connor — who shows off his tattooed bicep — and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, tease Will Poulter and Joseph Quinn, who had not yet gotten their ink.
“I have a tattoo on my soul from this experience,” jokes Quinn, prompting an eye roll and playful scoff from Melton. Adds Poulter, “Joe and I made a commitment that we are yet to sort of immortalize, and we plan to.”
And they did, getting the “Call on Me” tattoo prior to the March 27 Hollywood premiere of the movie, co-directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, which opens on a scene of the SEALs gathered around a TV watching the aerobics-class-inspired music video for Erik Prydz’s “Call on Me.”
Kit Connor shows off his ‘Call on Me’ tattoo. Eric Ray Davidson
Woon-A-Tai tells Entertainment Weekly that it took a while for the guys to agree on what they’d get, but they realized the song title actually held a deeper meaning.
“We got ‘Call on Me,’ a little cheesy metaphor that we can all call on each other,” he explains in the video above. “On a serious note, that’s the same song that became a tradition for these guys. Before they would leave [for the day], they would watch this music video. So that became a little tradition with us, too. Somebody would play it right in the morning, and it would hype us up.”
The cast — also including Noah Centineo, Michael Gandolfini, Finn Bennett, Evan Holtzman, Adain Bradley, Taylor John Smith, and Henrique Zaga — also took part in another SEAL tradition: giving each other nicknames. Quinn was tagged as “Funcle”; Smith was dubbed “Lamb Bone”; Woon-A-Tai had a few, including “Baby Ray,” that of Mendoza, who lived through the attack seen in the movie, but he eventually landed on “DP” and “Doza”; Melton borrowed his dad’s Army moniker, “Top,” after initially being called “Romeo”; and Cosmo Jarvis took on “Booger,” the nickname of Elliott Miller, the man he portrays.
Kit Connor, Charles Melton, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, and Joseph Quinn.
“Willy P,” Quinn says, “was ‘Daddy,’ obviously.” Explains Connor: “We were walking back from a curry house, and we were all not even drunk a drop — we were just high on life. I can’t remember who said it, but someone was just like, ‘What if we started calling Will ‘Daddy’ in front of Alex and Way? And they’ll hate that, and it’s going to be great.’ And for some reason, everyone loved it, and it stuck.”
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Check out our full cover story for Warfare (in theaters April 11), where they share insights into their intense training — including group head shaving and living together — and filming experience, how having the real SEALs on set impacted them, how this movie is different from anything they’ve been part of, and more.
