STACK August 2016 Issue 142

10 / 106

"I t was such an outrageous story, you
could hardly believe it was true,”
muses Jonah Hill when STACK meets
with him in Los Angeles. “I immediately went
after the rights but Todd beat me to it.”
“Todd” would be The Hangover director
Todd Phillips – but Hill wouldn’t come up
empty-handed. Phillips later cast him as Efraim
Diveroli, one half of War Dogs’ audacious duo.
Exploiting a government loophole to deal
arms to US troops in Iraq, 20-somethings
Diveroli and David Packouz (portrayed by Miles
Teller) lived the high life on the grey side of
the law ,until a deal turned sour and an angry
Albanian partner blew the whistle to the FBI.
The blow-out resulted in a seven-year
sentence for Diveroli and house arrest for
Packouz.
“The extraordinary thing is that this is
actually a true story. You couldn’t make this
stuff up,” laughs Phillips.
Hill agrees: “Efraim was so idiosyncratic,
selfish and outlandish; one of these people
you can’t believe really exist. It’s a pretty
complicated scenario to buy and sell weapons
when you don’t really have a company, and
how you build that out and get the reputation
to make those deals is interesting. It’s so
insane that these two guys end up in Fallujah;
humorous, but then it's also depressing, weird
and shocking.
“There’s something exciting about people
who are looking for the loopholes. These guys
definitely found a very peculiar and odd way
into making a lot of money. I can’t imagine this
would be the route I would think to go down,”
says Hill, whose other dodgy loophole-leaping
character in The Wolf of Wall Street earned him
an Oscar nod.
While Teller spent time with Packouz, Hill
didn’t share the same dubious pleasure.
“I never met him. I respect people’s space,”
he says – although in Efraim’s case that space
happened to be a prison cell.
“I’ve played real people a handful of times,
and sometimes they’re really psyched about it
and sometimes they’re not. For me, it's usually
a good sign if they’re not.”
Shot in multiple locations in Romania,
Morocco and the US, Hill’s greatest challenge
was his nightly spray tan sessions. “My body
literally does not accept spray tan. It sticks for
about a day when it's meant to last a week,
which meant I had to do it every day after
shooting. We’d finish at midnight and this
lovely woman named Felicia would come to
my room and spray me with freezing cold spray
tan stuff and then I’d go to sleep to shoot the
next day. My bed sheets would look like a
crime scene covered in all this wet spray tan. I
really came to resent it, but was happy when I
watched the movie because it's just so odd to
see this guy who is, like, orange.”
War Dogs also serves to introduce Cuban
beauty Ana de Armas, who STACK predicts has
a long career ahead.
War Dogs is in cinemas August 18.
visit
10 AUGUST 2016
EXTRAS NEWS
EXTRAS
ARMED AND DANGEROUS
A 2011 Rolling Stone article
about two unlikely Miami
dudes who landed a US$300
million defense contract
to arm the Afghan military
sent shock waves across
Hollywood, with studios
fighting for story rights.
The extraordinary thing is that this is actually a true story.
You couldn’t make this stuff up