Damson Idris felt ‘absolute fear’ before ‘F1’ test drive audition

Writer-director Joseph Kosinski redefined the “need for speed” with 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, and he’s ready to do it again — only this time on the race track.

The filmmaker is the mind behind this summer’s F1, out June 27, a movie that takes audiences inside the world of Formula One racing and puts them up close and personal with the sport and its drivers, who, as it turns out, have a fair amount in common with fighter pilots.

“They are the rock stars of their own universe,” Kosinski says, “and obviously they both have a need for speed.”

But when it came to actually making the film, there were very few similarities to Kosinski’s 2022 hit. “On Top Gun, we were off on an aircraft carrier 100 miles off the coast,” the director explains. “This movie we shot in front of an audience of 400,000 people. Often, I had only a few minutes to shoot a scene because we were actually shooting it at the real live event. There was a stage-play-esque vibe to this where we had to be very well prepared, but execute in the moment and only get a few takes at a scene.”

Yet it was Top Gun that inadvertently led to F1 in a roundabout way, as Kosinski first met F1 superstar Lewis Hamilton when they discussed the driver’s potential involvement with Maverick. Then, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Kosinski got hooked on the Netflix docu-series Drive to Survive, which follows teams over the course of the Formula One season.

“I was fascinated by this notion that your teammate can be your biggest enemy,” the director says. “Everyone’s always comparing who’s faster. To me, that seemed very ripe for drama. So, I dropped Lewis an email and said, ‘Hey, I’d love to make a movie in this world. Would you be interested in helping me?’ And he said he would.”

Now, four years later, that movie is ready to start its proverbial engine. F1 stars Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, a former driver who retired after a horrible crash. But old friend and former teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) approaches Sonny with a tantalizing proposition — come out of retirement and help coach his rookie prodigy, Joshua “Noah” Pearce (Damson Idris).

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The casting and narrative offer a fitting metaphor, given that Idris is a promising newcomer on screen himself (audiences will know him best from six seasons of FX’s Snowfall) and Pitt is a long-time movie star. Kosinski already knew Pitt and wanted an “icon” for the role; he felt the actor was the perfect choice.

Idris, on the other hand, landed the part after a series of auditions that culminated with the ultimate test — getting behind the wheel for real. The actor, 33, says he’s been a fan of F1 for a long time and attended his first race in 2018, but he never considered actually driving in one.

“The feeling I felt before was absolute fear,” the actor confesses. “But at the end of it, driving up to 180 miles per hour, going from track to track around the world, is an opportunity that I could never have dreamed of.”

It was crucial to Kosinski that his lead actors be able to do all their own driving. “After reading scenes, we actually put him in a race car out at a track just north of London,” the director says. “We spent a day testing his skills to make sure he had enough there that we could develop it into something.”

For Idris, it was a true test of his nerves thanks to some characteristically British weather. “It was insane,” he says. “The universe decided to rain that day. I went to Bedford Autodrome, and I jumped in an F-3000, and they attached cameras to the car. It was really a test of maturity, humility, and patience.”

From there, Idris spent seven months in intense training behind the wheel. “You start to go to sleep and dream of the corners,” he says. “You just build a real confidence due to the time and repetition going around the track.”

Though Idris never had a problem with the fast speeds, getting the car started was the true challenge. “I was really good at driving at crazy speeds,” the actor says. “I was really good at driving around the track and doing all the crazy turns. The hardest thing for me was actually getting a car started. The clutch is a hand clutch.”

Idris adds, “Brad was just exquisite at it. But man, there was some sort of coordination that just was not clicking with me. Once I got it started, I was ready to fly.”

And it turns out, driving as fast as you can isn’t just fun. It’s safer. Idris says “the best thing” the head stunt driver told him “was that the slower you drive, the worse it actually is for the car. The car starts to break down because you’re not getting enough heat into the tires.”

The actor’s preparation behind the wheel was the first step toward making something that felt electric and alive. But the other essential piece was getting the Formula One racing community to support and appear in the film.

“We had a scene where every single team came out with all their mechanics, and they pretended like everyone was repairing their cars on the pit while we were shooting,” Kosinski explains. “We shot at every race. We had a garage on the pit lane next to their garages. We would not have been able to make this movie without them. It certainly wouldn’t look the way it does without their participation.”

But that also made the filmmakers’ and actors’ groundwork even more critical. “We would often have five to 10 minutes, a very, very short window, to shoot a scene,” Kosinski says. “Only getting two or three takes is something that we’re not used to. It was more live performance, and we had to get it right.”

He adds, “I was amazed at how few mistakes people made when it really counted. It’s like something in your brain dials in and tells you you have to get it right. So you do.”

In addition to immersing the audience in the real races and locations of Formula One, the need to move quickly under pressure ultimately heightened the film’s stakes. “You feel it in the performances,” Kosinski notes. “There’s an energy and an adrenaline pumping through when shooting in a real situation that, hopefully, I was able to capture.”

That realism extended to drivers playing themselves in the film, both in dialogue scenes and driving in action scenes. Kosinski shot a podium sequence for the film at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, minutes after the actual medal podium was presented. But even though Kosinski found the drivers’ support invaluable, it didn’t mean Idris and Pitt were out there befriending them.

“I purposefully didn’t become friends with them because I wanted to have the mentality that they are my competition,” Idris explains.

Still, that didn’t stop him from asking for advice in critical moments. “We’re doing the national anthem at Silverstone [racetrack], and I turned to the right, and I was like, ‘Hey man, during the national anthem, do you zip the suit up or do you zip the suit down?’ Brad and I had ours up, and everyone else had theirs down.”

Idris also credits Hamilton and his presence on set with helping him shape his character. “He’d always come to set with such energy,” the actor says. “I’m completely indebted to him for teaching me the mindset of a rookie and how insane this sport is and how much focus it takes.”

Both Idris and Kosinski hope the film will inspire legions of new fans and showcase the wide variety of roles within the world of F1. “The film’s not just about the drivers,” the director says. “It’s about all the people behind the scenes, who make the car run, the engineers, the pit crew. You get to see a little bit of how a full team works.”

Even if you don’t know Formula One from NASCAR, don’t worry. “We had to make a film that worked for the F1 aficionado and at the same time played to someone who didn’t know anything about racing,” Kosinski concludes. “Serving those two gods at the same time has been a really unique challenge. But Formula One hasn’t nearly tapped its potential in the United States, and it’d be great to convert more people.”

In short, Kosinski hopes F1 will give a new audience the green flag to get into the sport.