Andrew Scott embraces 'unsung hero' role as D-Day meteorologist in Pressure

Andrew Scott sat down aboard HMS Belfast, the warship that opened fire on the Normandy coast seventy-eight years earlier, to talk about playing a man nobody remembers. Group Captain James Stagg was a meteorologist—not a soldier, not a general, not anyone whose name appears in the popular memory of D-Day. Yet without him, the largest seaborne invasion in history might never have happened at all.

Stagg's job was to read the weather. On June 6, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower needed conditions that seemed almost impossible to find: a full moon, low tide, minimal cloud cover, calm winds, and gentle seas. The meteorologists working in the planning rooms disagreed publicly and robustly with one another. Stagg had to navigate that chaos and advise the supreme commander. Scott describes him as "very chilly"—not warm, not ingratiating, not someone who tried to win friends. He was forthright, direct, obsessed with weather, and unafraid to speak truth to power. "A real fish out of water," Scott says, in a situation filled with military brass and enormous egos.

What drew Scott to the role was precisely what makes Stagg an unlikely hero. "So many of the heroes in our own lives don't have that big swashbuckling moment," Scott explains. Stagg wasn't garrulous. He didn't charm people. He simply knew his field and held his ground. The film, based on a 2014 stage play by actor and writer David Haig, traps the meteorologists and military planners in the D-Day planning rooms for three days, living on top of each other, working around the clock. The stakes were suffocating. Stagg's wife was heavily pregnant at home. Nobody could leave. The pressure—which gives the film its title—was unimaginable.

Scott found something moving in that constraint. "It's completely unimaginable, the pressure that they would have been under, not just Stagg, but everybody in the building." The film charts not just the technical challenge of predicting weather, but the human architecture of leadership itself. Eisenhower had the wisdom to listen to experts, to delegate to specialists, to recognize that power and expertise are not the same thing. "Real experts have the humility to go, 'I don't know about that, but I am in a position of power, so I'm going to delegate this, and I'm gonna listen to what this person has to say,'" Scott says. That theme—the humility of leadership—runs through the entire film.

Director Anthony Maras brought in Martin Young, a former deputy chief of the UK's Met Office who spent forty years studying weather and more than a decade as its chief forecaster, to ensure the film's technical accuracy. Young's knowledge of the processes, data, and equipment Stagg would have actually used grounded the story in historical reality. The film is nearly all set indoors, in those planning rooms, watching people work. Scott loved that. "I love films that are about work," he says. "These relationships are no less significant because they're work relationships, they're collegiate."

By the end of those three days, Stagg and his colleagues shook hands—he wasn't a hugger, Scott notes, probably not part of the culture then. But they had been through something enormous together, and they carried enormous feelings toward each other: rage, admiration, intimidation, connection. Scott is also pleased that the film honors another overlooked figure: Maureen Sweeney, who lived in Ireland and was the first to confirm a break in the weather from her lighthouse in County Mayo. As an Irish actor with family from that region, Scott found that thread particularly moving.

What stays with him is the quiet power of singular devotion. A young man becomes captivated by the weather. He applies himself. He becomes excellent. He serves a place in the world and in humanity. Then he quietly returns to his life. Decades later, a film pays tribute to him. "He's a movie hero," Scott says. Pressure opens in UK and Irish cinemas on September 9.