How a bomb disposal expert prepared Bond hopeful Aaron Taylor-Johnson for his new role – by blowing up a pig's head

Over the last two decades, Nick Orr's career as an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) specialist for both the British Army and voluntary organisations in war-torn countries has seen him working in all sorts of dangerous, life-threatening situations. But for one of his latest assignments, Orr found himself doing something very different: advising on a star-studded, big-budget film project.

Fuze, which arrives in UK cinemas this weekend, stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as an Afghanistan veteran and bomb disposal expert who is urgently called in to assist when an unexploded WWII bomb is discovered on a busy construction site in the centre of London. From there, the film takes all sorts of twists and turns – incorporating a heist element – with other key cast members including Theo James and Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

Orr – who has worked everywhere from Afghanistan, Mali and Iraq to Kuwait, Ukraine and Gaza – had been emailed asking if he'd put his name down for consideration as an adviser and, from what he's heard, his was the only CV the production team read before he was offered the role. Within a few days, he was having a Zoom call with Taylor-Johnson and director David McKenzie to work out exactly what was needed.

"I said, 'You tell me what you want, and I'll give you options that reflect your requirement,'" he recalls in an exclusive interview with Radio Times. "Ranging from completely plausible and viable to Hollywood fantasy.

"And [McKenzie] went, 'No, I want it absolutely to be realistic. And I said 'That's easier, we're not straying from the line. I've been doing that for years.' And then it went from there"

Orr's role from that point onwards included both checking over the script and consulting on set while filming was ongoing, ensuring that nothing shown on screen would be straying too far from the reality.

But perhaps one of his most fascinating involvements was the "explosives boot camp" he ran for the cast ahead of shooting. He knew that while the actors might have picked up some degree of knowledge from their own research, there were certain things that they couldn't glean purely from reading material. In other words, he needed to properly introduce them to explosives, and so took them to a range which was run by a friend.

"He said, 'What do you want to do with them?' [And] I said, 'As safely as you can I want to scare them. I want them to understand what explosives do and what that means."

So what exactly did that involve?

"We blew up a pig's head from a butcher’s to show what explosives do to flesh," he says. "It's grim, but it's true. It's factual. And it gives them something to base their response on."

Another exercise was detonating a 5kg explosive in a quarry. "We were about 30 meters away and you could feel a shock wave moving through you," he explains. "And they hadn't encountered that. So [that meant] their reactions to the detonations when they were filming were that much more realistic and precise, and I was very happy with that result."

Of course, with McKenzie having made clear he was looking for as realistic a depiction of explosives and bomb disposal as possible, there were certain traps it was vital not to fall into. It was paramount, Orr explains, to avoid the kind of "Hollywood, John Woo-style" of explosions where "there's great big balls of fire everywhere."

"You'll see a grenade detonate in a corner in a room in a James Bond film and the guy flies across the room," he says. "That doesn't happen. It doesn't move you. It will hurt you with fragmentation, but it won't move you massively.

"And then you see a great big detonation, and the guys are flying across car parks. And it doesn't [do that]. Think of throwing a watermelon in front of a high speed train. That's what it does to humans. It's not really comparable to the screen. The only film I've seen really getting it right was Saving Private Ryan."

Another of Orr's biggest bugbears when it comes to how things tend to be depicted on screen is less concerned with his specialist area of bomb disposal and explosives, but rather a general rule of how military personnel are portrayed – with one key detail often instantly breaking his immersion.

"Actors don't carry weight in their body armour or in their bones," he says. "Whereas [when I was a] soldier, I was carrying 50/60, kilos on my back and maybe 20 kilos on my chest. Water, ammunition, explosives. That changes the way your body moves. It changes the way you interact with the ground. It changes the way you can stand.

"You can't hold a pose, holding a conversation in a kneeling position for five minutes when you're carrying that weight. So when Aaron's doing the scenes in Afghanistan [in Fuze], his kit is fully loaded. He's got ballistic plates on, he's got water bottles. Obviously he doesn't have bullets in there, but he's got supplementary weight in there, so that you can see that the weight is hanging off him, and when he's moving, it's holding him down. And that shows."

In addition to communicating the importance of those physical aspects, there were other more psychological lessons Orr was able to impart to Taylor-Johnson as well. The actor spoke to him in depth and was determined to understand what made him tick – where does the fear lie when he's out doing his job in dangerous and volatile war zone environments? Orr certainly has no shortage of experience to draw on when it comes to advising people on this front.

"I was an instructor of IED and EOD bomb disposal at both the UK schools, and I've seen many, many people come through," he says. "I've seen the absolute wizards of the world, British Army officers, coming through and overthinking it. Then you get a very, very young, pragmatic sergeant who just does what he's told and gets on with it.

"It's about understanding what you need to do," he adds. "And the biggest lesson I can get across to any student of mine is understanding what is appropriate in the moment, and that will change depending on what you have previously done and what you're about to do.

"And for every device, for every item, from a grenade to a nuclear bomb, there is what we call an appropriate response. If you don't understand what that is at that point in the task, then you're going to hurt someone or hurt yourself. I think Aaron carried it very well. I was very impressed, because the way he comes across as Will Tranter is not what he's like... He's quite a jovial guy!"

You might wonder if – given the nature of his work – there was anything that Orr couldn't reveal to Taylor-Johnson and the crew, either from a safety or a secrecy standpoint. But he explains that while there naturally are certain details from his real life experience he can't disclose, "we weren't touching on anything like that in Fuze."
He adds: "It deals with a couple of IEDs from Afghanistan, and then it deals with a German World War Two bomb. And the technology there is well known and well documented. It's all open source. So there was nothing I felt uncomfortable about revealing."

When it came to being on set, Orr also found himself getting involved with the pyrotechnics team whose job it was to bring the explosions to life. They had a Styrofoam cannon which "kicks out dust and dirt and polystyrene and foam parts" that are designed to look like rocks, and his role was to advise how much of the Styrofoam was required for each explosion and to let them know when they would need a "real big cloud of dust and dirt" or a "blinding white flash".

He was very much aware that "time is money" on set, however, and kept his interventions to a minimum while things were being shot. "There's only a couple of shots where I went, 'We need to look at that again. That's not an appropriate response," he says.

"One of the prop wires was stretching, or bouncing and they're supposed to be really heavy, dense copper wire, so it wouldn't have had any movement and stuff like that caught my eye. And I was like, 'I think probably we need to kind of keep that an eye on that.' But it was very little."

Apart from anything else, he explains, he didn't want to cross any boundaries and abuse his position as an adviser to exert too much authority over the artistic vision of McKenzie. This is something he reckons a few people in his line of work may have a little more trouble dealing with, which means he has to be careful about which of his peers to bring on board for this kind of work in the future.

"There's no way I'm going to tell a director they can't do something, ever," he says. "If his option is fantasy, it's still his option. I'm just there to advise.

"So I don't want someone with the strength of character of my peer group going, 'Nope. You can't do that.’ They’d be kicked off set and I'd be embarrassed. I've got to really choose who I take with me!"

Clearly, though, Orr enjoyed his first experience advising on a film production and hopes to be back in a similar role soon. Although he's unable to give specifics, he mentions that he's got "a few irons in the fire" and is "working on a few things at the moment."

So would he do anything different next time around?

"I'd have done it longer!" he says. "We only had time to do the explosive boot camp, but I'd like to do a couple of days on how to act as a soldier, how to dress, how to salute. Just a very, very basic training."

"I've had some really good gigs and some some troubling gigs [in my career]," he adds. "I enjoy bomb disposal, but I gotta say... I prefer movies now!"

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