John Magaro On How He Prepared To Tell The Olympics Story That Horrified The World In ‘September 5’

John Magaro is the glue that holds September 5 together. He stars as ABC Sports producer Geoffrey Mason, who was covering the 1972 Munich Olympics when Black September terrorists took Israeli athletes hostage in the Olympic compound. Magaro must convey the enormous pressure and responsibility placed on Mason as he is suddenly thrust into the hot seat to produce live coverage. Director Tim Fehlbaum chose Magaro because, he says, “He’s one of the best there is.” Next, Magaro is set to appear with Michael Fassbender in the spy drama The Agency, followed by Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film The Bride.

DEADLINE: You weren’t even born then, but what did you already know about Munich ’72?

JOHN MAGARO: I knew about it. I don’t know why I knew about it. I mean, I’ve always been a lover of history. My mother’s Jewish. I was raised Jewish, so I think there was part of that in the air. I remember, as an American growing up, that when there was an anniversary, there would be specials on about it. I do remember that image of the Black September member on the balcony being in my brain at a very young age. I remember hearing discussions about it. I was also an extra in Munich [Steven Spielberg’s 2005 classic about how Israeli operatives hunted down those responsible].

DEADLINE: What scene were you in?
MAGARO: It’s when Eric Bana is walking across the street in New York. I’m this skinny little boy, fresh off the boat into New York, walking across the street from him.

So, I saw Munich again. It’s very different, and I really want to hammer it into everyone’s heads that September 5 is not Munich for so many reasons. Munich is something totally different.

DEADLINE: Yes, September 5 is a fast-paced film about people adapting. Munich’s about retaliation.

MAGARO: In a lot of ways it’s a vengeance movie, and this isn’t. I wouldn’t say this is apolitical. I just don’t think it’s a political movie. It’s about journalism and journalists have politics. But anyway, I knew about Munich. I didn’t know that it was the first time that the Olympics were broadcast globally. I didn’t know all that went into putting the Olympics together, even in that rudimentary form. It’s a full circus. ABC Sports comes to town, sets up, builds a city, and then leaves. It’s kind of crazy.

DEADLINE: What were the circumstances of you landing the film’s key role?

MAGARO: I was shooting another film at the time in New Mexico. This little film that I did with Steve Zahn that I was actually a producer on, called LaRoy, Texas — a really fun, dark comedy. It had some good life to it and people seemed to enjoy it. I was out there in Albuquerque alone doing my job, coming home at night, bored, trying to be good and focus on the work. Especially when you’re lead number one on a call sheet, I think you feel this responsibility that you really want to guide the ship and set a good example. I’ve learned that from watching other people I look up to and admire, how they operate when they’re number one on the call sheet.

DEADLINE: Like who?

MAGARO: Brad Pitt. We worked on War Machine and The Big Short. Working with Fassbender right now on The Agency, he’s doing that. But all those guys, [Steve] Carell, his work ethic on The Big Short was really impressive; Cate Blanchett on Carol. You see these people and how they work, and you see why they’re so revered and so successful, because they’re not just great actors, they’re lovely people to be around.

So yeah, I was doing LaRoy, but then I got a script, and it gave me something at night to read. At that point, Peter Sarsgaard was already attached, and Sean Penn was already on as producer. So you see that and you immediately know it must be OK, there must be something here. I don’t see how Peter would’ve signed on and Sean Penn would’ve signed on if this was just a big stinker. So, I sat down and started to read it. It helped that it was about ninety pages, so I knew I could get through it, but it also helped that it was just captivating and that the ball, once it started rolling, it felt like it kept rolling, and new things were being unveiled, and it really just kept me going. By the end, I was really excited about it.

DEADLINE: Your character finds himself controlling the news broadcast.

MAGARO: Selfishly, as an actor, you also want your character to be good. And I thought Geoff was really a cool character, because I love that he was positioned in this way of having the angel on one side and the devil on the other side, where you already have Roone Arledge [Sarsgaard] who’s pushing the limits of journalism and potentially doing things that maybe aren’t the right decision. And then you have Marvin Bader, Ben Chaplin’s character, who is this mentor and guiding force and drawing him back to what you’re really supposed to do, just having no time to think and going on that ride. I saw that and I knew I wanted to be a part of it. It was a pretty quick decision. I called right away and was like, “Yeah, let’s do this.”

DEADLINE: What was the key stuff you learned from Geoff? Did you meet in person?

MAGARO: Once I was cast, Geoff really wanted to talk to me right away. I could sense it in that first conversation with him that he was really nervous about this, really worried. I mean, almost to the degree where it felt like he may just take it and run away if we didn’t put him at ease, which I totally get. We didn’t meet until after, but we had a lot of Zoom sessions. This was still during Covid, and he lives in Florida, and I was in New York. So right away we got on Zoom and we started talking. I let him know that the way I work is to just tell the story, to be as honest as possible, and to do my work so I can try and portray what he was doing on that day as authentically as I can. He also didn’t really know my work, so he’s like, who is this guy?

DEADLINE: So, he hadn’t seen First Cow [Kelly Reichardt’s 2019 feature]?

MAGARO: [Laughs] I don’t think that made it down to Florida. In fact, he did say he went off and watched a couple things I did. It might’ve been The Big Short or something like that.

So we just kept talking. I was picking his brain. I wanted to know what he went through on that day. And sometimes talking to real people can be unhelpful, but this time it was really helpful. When I was talking to Geoff, it didn’t feel like he was protecting himself in the story. It felt like he was protecting his team. He was really concerned that everyone else got their due. And unfortunately, in the story, obviously we had to tighten it up. And the role that I do play in the film is sort of an amalgamation of two or three people. There was a director on the ground and then there was also Geoff as the producer. And we had to sort of fuse those roles together just for narrative purposes. But I tried to assure him that we would still give some sort of homage to that person. And we did. Daniel Betts, a great English actor who I had worked with on War Machine, plays the director in the first scene who goes off to the Alps on vacation, and we gave him the name Dan Wilson. That’s a tip of the hat. So, Geoff was really concerned about not forgetting anyone, or leaving anyone behind, which I really respected.

DEADLINE: What was the essence of what Geoff told you about being there that day?

MAGARO: He made it clear that on the day it was just go, go, go, go, go. No time to think, no time to be emotional. You just did your job. And it wasn’t until after that you went home and cried and let the tragedy wash over you. Then he got me obviously into [real-life] control rooms, which was huge. I couldn’t have done it without that research.

DEADLINE: Is Geoff also Jewish?

MAGARO: No, he’s not. And so, the character is not Jewish… We know that the room and the broadcast compound was full of people from all over the world, a lot of Germans, a lot of French. There were French Muslims in the compound, but as far as I know, the only American Jew was Marvin [Bader], Ben Chaplin’s role. [Bader] certainly must have felt something beyond what Geoff could have felt in that moment. But again, if you ask Geoff about it, he was just focused on doing his job. It wasn’t about being Jewish, it wasn’t about being Arabic, it was about being a journalist. That’s part of why I don’t think Tim [Fehlbaum] wanted to make this some statement about the politics of the matter, because journalists ideally leave their politics behind, and especially back then, more so than nowadays, it wasn’t about thinking about what side you want to promote or what side you don’t want to promote, it was just telling the story. I think Roone’s view was to make clear that the Israeli hostages were the vulnerable ones and the Black September terrorists the aggressive ones. I have to pick my hero and villain here, and that’s how Roone’s brain operated.

DEADLINE: I love that scene of Geoff helping to wheel that big mother of a camera out into the compound.

MAGARO: That camera was so cumbersome. It moves this way and that way on its axis, but it doesn’t move the other way. We crushed Peter [Sarsgaard] against the wall. It was a real camera. All that equipment was real. These Germans, I don’t know how they do it. They found all this stuff. I went down to the CBS broadcast facility on 57th Street. They took me down to the basement where they have the retired equipment. This stuff has gone into the place in Beetlejuice where the dead people go. It’s retired from retirement. Our production designer had to find some random collector in Germany who had it. He traced it down and then we had amazing technicians who got them all up and working. Same with all the TVs, same with all the phones, I think.

DEADLINE: What else did you learn about Geoff’s duties?

MAGARO: Well, going back to the base, which was at CBS Sunday Sports and ESPN, at the Madison Square Garden, learning that language of the control room, that was two months, learning how to do that, going home, watching sporting events, mock calling the show as I would watch sporting events. I’d start to say the language I was learning in the control room to the TV, like a mental case, just calling a show. Like, “Camera 5! And 6!” And then, on top of that, I think hopefully I brought just what I try to bring as an actor inherently to what I do. I mean, I hope what I offer is something unique.

DEADLINE: Did Geoff talk to at all you about the ethical pressures they felt?

MAGARO: He’s pretty much like steel about that. He says it was tense, but he doesn’t really acknowledge the pressure. He sees it as he was just doing his job, and whether it was covering the boxing on that day or covering what happened on that day, it would’ve been approached very similarly. I think that’s how that team thought about it in the moment. Like I said, it wasn’t until after that they went back to the hotel room and had a few drinks, and all of a sudden that party atmosphere of the nights before was gone, and the guilt of what happened and the grief of what happened laid over them, the drinks didn’t go down as easy and the tears started to come up. It was very clear from the conversation with Geoff that those thoughts did not happen while they were calling the 22 hours of that day.

DEADLINE: But views are exchanged in the film about ethical matters?

MAGARO: They did have those conversations. They had the conversations about, can we show someone being shot on live TV? Did they see this broadcast live on TVs in the apartments? These were conversations they had, but again, they had to keep going. There was no time to really wallow in those moments or hyper-analyse. They aren’t psychologists, they’re not geopolitical scientists, they’re not humanitarians. They’re sports journalists. They’re not even proper journalists.

DEADLINE: Well, hang on, a lot of sports writers have been general news journalists, at least in the U.K. and Jim McKay was also a former crime reporter.

MAGARO: And that’s not a dis to them. It’s just they are sports journalists. Everything that they had been trained to do could not have prepared them for that moment. So why is the film not more political? Because it’s sports journalists who are there. You have Peter Jennings trying to get them on board, but I think that’s also what makes this story special, because it was these people who were not really prepared for the events of life to fall upon them. And now they have to take the reins and unbeknownst to them forever change the way news is covered, and that’s f*cking crazy.