Connor Swindells Talks 'Bonkers' Shoot in Sahara Desert for 'Rogue Heroes'

The elite unit of the Special Air Service (SAS) was born in North Africa when the British Army was based in the region, and to recreate this period of history, the cast of Rogue Heroes had to contend with the "bonkers" climate of the Sahara Desert, actor Connor Swindells told Newsweek.

On paper, the Sahara Desert probably doesn't seem like the most hospitable place to film, and Swindells confirmed this as he described how multiple sandstorms and extreme heat by the end of their shoot made the war-time drama difficult to make.

Connor Swindells Talks 'Bonkers' Shoot in Sahara Desert for 'Rogue Heroes'

The SAS was formed in July 1941 at the height of World War II when the Nazis and Axis Powers were gaining momentum and all but winning the war. It was a young Scottish officer named David Stirling who came up with the idea of a force that could operate behind enemy lines and destroy them from the shadows.

Swindells portrays Stirling opposite Jack O'Connell and Alfie Allen, who play fellow founders Paddy Mayne and Jock Lewes respectively. The drama is based on Ben Macintyre's historical account of the group, titled SAS: Rogue Heroes, with Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight at the helm and Tom Shankland directing.

The cast and crew of Rogue Heroes only planned to be in the Sahara Desert for seven weeks, but this increased to two-and-a-half months because of the difficult weather conditions they faced day in and day out, the actor revealed.

"I think the plan was to get out within a seven-week period because the weather was going to start getting too hot and by the end it was like 50 degrees [Celsius, 122 Fahrenheit] every day during the last week, it was pretty brutal," Swindells said.

Not only was it hot, but the cast also had to work around other adverse weather conditions such as sandstorms, which often forced them to stop shooting.

"You're battling the elements and sandstorms that blow through for four hours every day," Swindells said. "They're [happening] and you hope it passes so that you can manage to salvage something of what you've already shoot or to get something of what you are looking to shoot.

"It was definitely a wakeup call for me perhaps [because] I was probably as an actor becoming quite lazy, and this kind of woke me up to having to really pull my finger out [and] work hard."

The actor went on to say that it "was extremely hard," particularly because of the way in which filming in the Sahara impacted the actors mentally, though he felt the need to preface that nothing could be "as hard as anything that the real guys went through" in the SAS.

"The Sahara Desert is beautiful for the first couple of days and then it starts to kind of drive you crazy and there's this weird thing where your brain starts to turn upside down inside your skull because we are doing scenes on sand dunes all day and then you've got heat to deal with," he added.

"But within that hardship you have to figure out a way to get through it and you do that by having fun wherever you can, and laughing and telling stories and telling anecdotes, telling jokes and playing poker all night long until four o'clock in the morning and drinking. It was an experience I'll never forget and the bonds that I made on that job I think will last forever, or at least they'll be with me forever."

Despite the difficulty of shooting in such conditions, the actor said that he "really enjoyed the challenge of all of it" and he praised his fellow cast members for making the shoot feel like "a dream come true."

It was Shankland who proved to be the most important resource for the actor, particularly because he only had one day's break between finishing filming Season 3 of Sex Education before beginning work on Rogue Heroes.

Switching from Adam Groff into David Stirling was no easy feat for the actor, and he admitted that he "really leaned on" Shankland to make the transformation work.

"I really had no prep time at all, and he was a tremendous help, without him I don't think I would have done it," Swindells explained. "Without him none of us would have been able to do it because the hardships that we faced out in the Sahara Desert were bonkers, and he faced them all with a smile.

"He kept morale extremely high when it wanted to dip. So, he was our captain, he was definitely my North Star."

On the Unbelievable True Stories of the SAS, and Why It Needs To Be Told Now

Rogue Heroes prefaces the show by saying that the story it depicts, no matter how unbelievable, is "mostly true," and Swindells shared how the drama "actually dulled down" some events in the SAS's history because viewers wouldn't think it was real.

"Some of the stuff that they did you wouldn't believe it if you saw it on TV, so, if anything, things were toned down just to make them a little bit more believable," the actor explained. "Even so, in the show they're still crazy. I think the whole Benghazi raid was just completely [crazy], it's crazy to think about all the stuff that they did."

The Benghazi raid of May 1942 saw Stirling and members of the SAS, as well as Winston Churchill's son Randolph, go undercover in the occupied Libyan port city, pretending to be German when they encountered Italian soldiers at the checkpoint.

The group successfully infiltrated the city, and their mission was to plant explosives that would destroy the Axis Powers' weapons and torpedo boats. In reality the mission failed because of various factors, but in the drama, it is shown to be a success and is one of the highlights of Stirling's story arc.

Although history was altered slightly for the drama in this instance, another was not. The SAS's first mission really did end in disaster when they decided to parachute out of a plane during a sandstorm in November 1941. Their mission was to raid a German airfield but instead it resulted in several casualties with 34 killed, wounded or captured out of a team of 55 men.

Swindells shared how the cast really did learn to parachute for these scenes (though not in a real sandstorm of course) and they did it with the help of stunt coordinator Neil Finnighan, who previously worked on The Dark Knight Rises where he did the mid-air plane to plane highjack jump at the start of the film.

For Swindells, it seems timely to dramatize the founding of the SAS because it is "an amazing story of bravery."

"It's also an amazing story of masculinity, and I think that these men were troubled men who somehow were able to put aside their differences and come together and fight evil," he added. "It's a good, entertaining, exciting show of course, but it's also a good insight into, I think, the way that men can really wrestle with their own demons and the way that they can manifest [things] especially in that time.

"The manifestations of the suppressed rage, or whatever it was, were disastrous in many ways, but having said that they ended up forming one of the most effective special forces units in the world."

Rogue Heroes premieres on EPIX on Sunday, November 13 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.