Ray Nicholson didn’t know who he was for most of his life. He went from a lost, chubby kid on the basketball team to a high school football player with dreams of going pro to now a budding Hollywood actor. But in his role as Tony Butkovich in the new Netflix film, The Mosquito Bowl , he may have finally found himself. The World War II drama, based on the Buzz Bissinger book by the same name, follows four college football stars as they set aside their NFL dreams to enlist in the US Marines in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. His time on set was both physically and emotionally taxing, yet his return to knee pads gave him the blessing of reminding him of his first love. Before the film drops on the streaming platform, Nicholson called the person who knows him better than anyone, his sister Lorraine Nicholson , to talk basic training, deathbed epiphanies, and the brotherhood that can only be found on the football field and the battlefield.
SATURDAY 10 AM OCTOBER 24, 2026 LOS ANGELES
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: The Interview person is not on, so I’m like, “Great, now we can edit the interview.” Losers. Actually, I’m just going to write it. [Laughs]
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: I’m going to make you look like the fucking number one genius of all time.
RAY NICHOLSON: I’m Sir Laurence Olivier. 100%.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Exactly. How are you, Ray?
RAY NICHOLSON: I’m great. How are you doing?
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: I’m very good. I’m excited to be interviewing you.
RAY NICHOLSON: It’s really sick. Truly the highlight of this whole thing has been our interaction. After that, I was very chill and no fucks given because I was like, “My work is already done. My sister loves the movie.”
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: You have the family seal of approval. Wait, quickly—I just can’t wait to tell you about the night that I had last night.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: So last night in the movie, we were supposed to shoot a bar mitzvah sequence, and obviously the kids are supposed to fucking freak dance.
RAY NICHOLSON: Oh my god, and they don’t know how.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: They refused. They’re like, “Sorry, we just don’t feel comfortable touching.”
RAY NICHOLSON: “ It’s a freak train, guys. Damn it.”
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: I’m like, “‘ Freak Till You Leak’ is playing. Why don’t you guys want to do it?”
RAY NICHOLSON: We probably need to get these 12-year-olds to watch this movie and be like, “Enjoy your life.” If things go well, we’re having a “ Freak Till You Leak” volume six, or whatever it is.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Ray, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed by me.
RAY NICHOLSON: Lorraine, it is my greatest honor.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: I am so proud of you. Can you describe my reaction upon seeing this film?
RAY NICHOLSON: We were doing this Q&A after the Academy screening, and I didn’t know that you were going to be there, and you didn’t know that I was going to be there. And when I came out, I was like, “Oh, those are particularly louder claps for me. People like my performance.” And then, we get to the end of the Q&A, and I see you stand up in the middle of the aisle, and you just rushed my arms and we both started crying, just holding each other. Later, I found out that Bill [Skarsgård], Pete [Berg], and Tom [Francis] were crying. Everybody was crying watching us.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: That’s such good news because when I revisit those photos, I see me sobbing with my hair sticking up surrounded by four gorgeous men.
RAY NICHOLSON: That was also part of the truth. Everyone was concerned for our mental wellbeing, but that is usually the case if they know us.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: I know how hard you work, so to see you find a role that’s so perfect for you was so moving to me.
RAY NICHOLSON: This was a dream opportunity. Before I even knew about The Mosquito Bowl , I was talking to my team and I was hoping that, while I was young, I could do a war movie and I could do a sports movie. And then this came to me.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: We were at the Chinese Theater at a premiere, and I remember you telling me that you got the part. We both started to cry. As someone who knows you possibly the best of all, I see so much of your evolution as a person through football. Can you talk a little bit about that? Ray was a chubby kid, may the record show.
RAY NICHOLSON: I was fully a fat kid. [Laughs] I probably weighed the same as I do now when I was nine-years-old, and I am now 5’11” and I was then 4’11”. I just had this sense of shame growing up. At my first basketball practice, we were running around the court as a warm-up lap, and I was so exhausted, and these kids were effortlessly running ahead of me. I literally tripped over the half court, and I was so ashamed I had to sit out crying the rest of the practice. But these guys picked me up, and so much of sports is about family, brotherhood, and lifting someone up. I was a total stranger, and these were all inner city kids, and I had never experienced anything like that.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Especially those coaches. Obviously, we have a father, but they became father figures to you.
RAY NICHOLSON: Totally. Every coach that you have becomes a surrogate father and somebody that’s really pushing you. I really respond to that. I’m very adverse to love. I’m very in your face yelling at you, “Do better.”
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Well, I feel that is the kind of director you found in Pete Berg.
RAY NICHOLSON: Totally, and very early on we had conversations in that regard. Pete is the most authentic human being that you’ll meet in your life. He is not going to suffer fools, but he’s also very sensitive and fragile.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: The movie has so much heart. You have these incredible, highly technical, violent sequences, but then you have these moments of rest where you’re with the protagonists eating after the battle and their hands are shaking. Those are the best parts of the film. They’re actually more affecting than seeing people’s heads blown off because you see the effect that war and violence has on these kids.
RAY NICHOLSON: And they were just kids. That was probably the biggest heartbreak of this whole thing. You see these guys in World War II, and my brain is so ingrained to be like, “Oh, well, these are all grown men.” Now, being a 34-year-old man playing someone who died when he was 23, it’s staggering. The other day, we met the surviving family members of Dave Schreiner, Bob Baumann, John McLaughry, and Tony Butkovich who had six brothers and two sisters, and they were first-generation immigrants. The whole future of this family was on Tony’s shoulders, and he didn’t make it. There’s 75 million of those stories during World War II.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: It’s hard for the contemporary audience to understand what would motivate that kind of sacrifice. How did you find that?
RAY NICHOLSON: When I’m looking at something like that, I’m trying to serve the script. It’s about the immortality of youth, feeling that the world is at your fingertips, finding out it’s so much bigger than you could possibly imagine, and the fall from that innocence. I also know what it feels like to be crushed by the world, you know what I mean?
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Even the decision to become a professional actor, there is that ego that believes like, “I am going to be the exception.”
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Can you talk a little bit about the process of actually making this movie? I imagine it was so challenging.
RAY NICHOLSON: Yeah, it was. We came in and we had a month of basic training, both in football and in drill military stuff. We were learning how to assemble and shoot a real M1 rifle. If someone is shooting nine feet away from you, you feel a wave of energy hit you, and everything added a level of incomprehensibility to the whole situation. Essentially, we woke up early in the morning, had four hours of football practice, which to me was a dream. We started filming, and I was like, “I am going to look awesome.”
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: How did this all come together? Because the other stars are all Europeans and one’s a theater nerd, so there’s not a lot of football in the background.
RAY NICHOLSON: Tom struggled immensely. [Laughs] We spent a lot of time one-on-one together going through football stuff. He was the first person I met in the cast, and I felt that was really important because of this rivalry to friendship at the heart of the movie. So I went to New York to see Tom in Sunset Boulevard .
RAY NICHOLSON: He’s a complete god on the stage. You’re like, “Wow. What a face.” The next day we went to the New York Giants facility, and there’s a basketball court and Tom goes to pick up a basketball, and the way that he shot it, I was like, “Oh my god, this is going to be the longest five months of my life.” [Laughs] But I think that my relationship with Tom was so important because we were “in the trenches” together. I admired Bill’s work, so he was the guy that I keyed on as like, “Need to impress Bill.” We were in Australia together, and we got to talking about books, and I could tell that I was assuaging his opinion about me. We became each other’s therapists, and the three of us really became brothers. I was the middle child, Tom was the youngest, and Bill was the older brother that we were both clamoring for affection from. We really fell in love with each other.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: When I finally got to meet Bill, I was like, “This is my rival for Ray’s heart. I’m Ray’s older sibling, not you, Bill Skarsgård.”
RAY NICHOLSON: Bill’s family came, and when they left, we knew that he was sad, so Tom and I made little Skarsgård shirts.
RAY NICHOLSON: We’re honorary members of the Skarsgård family, so we also met Alex [Skarsgård] and were like, “Hey, brother.” This giant Swedish family was like, “We don’t know you,” and we’re like, “Oh, come on.”
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: When you guys first got to Australia, obviously, everyone had to learn how to play football. What were some of those early practices like?
RAY NICHOLSON: I was working out with Christian McCaffrey, who’s literally one of the best athletes in the world. So I go from this to Aussie football players, none of whom can really play American football. These early practices were hard because it’s so difficult to choreograph 11-on-11 man football. It was also a dream to be able to throw pads on again and hit dummies and do all the drills. It was awesome to feel that confidence boost, and that was so important to the character of Tony, being like, “Aha, I am better than everyone.”
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: As your sister, in those scenes, I felt your confidence and arrogance as a football player.
RAY NICHOLSON: Someone from Netflix came up and was like, “Oh my god, you were so fantastic. You’re such an asshole.” And I’m like, “Thank you.”
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Ray finds the perfect part. You do struggle in real life with your confidence, so it’s funny that the parts you seem to be connecting with are these super arrogant asshole types.
RAY NICHOLSON: Part of it is how I’m seen from the outside, somebody that has it all and couldn’t not be confident. I guess it gives you permission to be that. You know what I mean?
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Yeah, and that underbelly of insecurity or softness is what gives that character its depth.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Seeing you as Ray go through these horrors of war gave me a new understanding and hatred of what people are capable of doing to each other. For me, it’s the ultimate anti-war movie.
RAY NICHOLSON: I hope other people feel that way. But if I affected you alone, I’m glad we’re anti-war in this family.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Thank you, Netflix. You’ve turned me into a peacenik.
RAY NICHOLSON: Everyone has grown up so removed from this kind of global conflict. 45,000 people, I think, a month die in the Ukraine-Russia conflict right now. It’s impossible to understand, but displaying that after you fall in love with these guys, those numbers are unfathomable. About three-quarters of the way through filming, I was in the makeup chair with Angela Conti, and we were doing the death mask of Tony Butkovich. And as the makeup was getting put on my face, I just started crying because I was like, “Oh my god, this kid just fucking disintegrated.” It’s so heavy.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Yeah, it is. Should we talk more about football?
RAY NICHOLSON: Yeah, let’s talk about ball.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: What award did you get as a football player?
RAY NICHOLSON: I was an All Southern Section CIF MVP.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Right. Through your discipline and willpower, you turned yourself into an athlete. You work harder than anybody that I know, and so I’m just so happy to see you have this success.
RAY NICHOLSON: It’s really interesting because football came to me at a time when I needed it so bad. I get choked up even talking about it. It really saved my life at the time. It is a violent sport, but it’s a sport driven by love.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Do you think that’s true of acting too?
RAY NICHOLSON: Yeah, I do. I have this indescribable void and I can only fill it with intensity. And there is this intensity in football and in being on set. And the times when I commit myself fully, I feel that love and wholeness. Obviously, there’s other things I do day-to-day, but nothing fills it like that.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: Can you talk a little bit about your decision to become an actor?
RAY NICHOLSON: Well, actually, I thought that I was going to go to Boston College and play football. I thought I was going to be Jerry Maguire. I love sports so much. It’s also the language of love that me and dad share. We can’t talk about a lot, but we can talk about the fucking Lakers until kingdom come. But anyway, we have this very Friday Night Lights moment, 4th and 1, and we lose the game. I sat in a locker room for 45 minutes, just devastated that this high school football thing was over. I go home with mom, and by the time I get home, I can’t move my arm. I go to mom, I’m like, “I think I broke my elbow.” We went to the hospital right away and they sent us out because I had a staph infection that got so bad it turned into MRSA, and I had to have 24-hour nurses. They put a mark on my arm that was like, “If it gets past here, we’re cutting your arm.”
RAY NICHOLSON: And it was this voice-of-god moment that was like, “You don’t want to do this. You want to be an actor.” I was really scared to tell dad. But I went to USC and learned to love everything about filmmaking. My education really taught me that dad isn’t god. He’s not the only thing in this film industry. He’s a beautiful part of it, but a very small part. Yes, of course, making dad proud is high on my list, but this is really a way of finding who I am. And I feel that I’m on the right path to that.
RAY NICHOLSON: Thank you so much for doing this.
LORRAINE NICHOLSON: You’re awesome. I’m very proud of you.
Source: Fashion
