“Maybe if it’s weird if you feel unprepared, but if that’s the case, you didn’t do your homework,” Teller said, in a phone interview, of the two true-life roles, as a firefighter in “Only the Brave” (opening nationwide this Friday) and as a soldier in “Thank You For Your Service” (opening nationwide on Friday, Oct. 27).
In “Only the Brave,” Teller plays Brendan McDonough, a member of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a fire crew based out of Prescott, Ariz., that became the only municipal firefighting unit certified as a wildfire crew. McDonough served as lookout on the Yarnell Hill Fire in June 2013, and was the only member of the 20-man crew to survive when the fast-moving fire overtook his comrades, in the most deadly incident for American firefighters since the 9/11 attacks.