[Editor's note: The following contains some spoilers for Valiant One.]
Summary
- 'Valiant One' is a military thriller following a small Army team in dangerous circumstances in present-day Korea.
- Lana Condor, who plays Selby, talks about why the project was so special to her, the authentic training, and the responsibility to honor the U.S. military.
- The film showcases equality among team members, with Condor's character being strong and respected.
The military thriller Valiant One follows a small Army team in present-day Korea who unexpectedly find themselves past the DMZ when they crash in North Korea, mortally wounding their commanding officer and leaving Sgt. Brockman (Chase Stokes) making decisions that will hopefully keep them alive long enough to get out of such a dangerous situation. Along with fellow soldiers Selby (Lana Condor), Lee (Daniel Jun) and Ross (Jonathan Whitesell), and tech specialist Weaver (Desmin Borges), the team has to make it through the jungle for their own survival.
During this one-on-one interview with Collider, Condor talked about why Valiant One was her dream project, showcasing Selby’s strengths, being treated with respect on set, the responsibility they had to honor the U.S. military, and the authentic training and preparation they went through for their roles. She also talked about the upcoming thriller Ballerina Overdrive, how it was the most intense action she’d ever done, and that Valiant One helped her prepare.
'Valiant One' Was the Perfect Project To Satisfy Lana Condor's Obsession With War Films
"I've actually been quoted saying that my dream role would be Andrew Garfield's 'Hacksaw Ridge,' but for a woman."
Collider: People know and love you from To All the Boys, and a project like this certainly shows a very different side to you. I talk to a lot of actors who tell me that they would love to do a war movie or a Western, but I don’t really ever hear that from actresses. Before this came your way, was that something you thought about at all?
LANA CONDOR: Absolutely. I’ve actually been quoted saying that my dream role would be Andrew Garfield’s Hacksaw Ridge, but for a woman. Weirdly, I have an obsession with war films. I love thrillers. I don’t know what that says about me, but they are more my comfort movies than anything else. I’ve always loved watching them, and I’ve always thought, “Man, I would love to know what it’s like to make something like that.” And so, when I got the opportunity to do Valiant One, it was the first time that our amazing producers and our amazing director and the production company and just someone in the industry, in general, believed I could do something so wildly different from what I’m known for, and that was really, really, really special to me. I was so grateful to them for believing in me. It weirdly was something that I was dying to do and I just hadn’t really been given the opportunity to do it until they came to me.

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Was the script that you first read the movie that we see now? There isn’t much made of your character being a woman on this team. She’s not weaker because she’s a woman. Was it always that way on the page?
CONDOR: Yes, it was. It was always that way on the page. I did so much research on women in the military. I come from a military family. My brother is currently serving in Japan. My uncle is a general. My grandparents served. And I had done so much research on women who are actively in the military. Something that I found was that I was really blown away by the sense of equality in that space. To be honest, I was surprised. With this film, we wanted to showcase Selby’s strengths, her ability and her talents, but we really wanted her to be a part of the team, period. And the actors and the whole production genuinely honestly treated me like an equal, and it was an all-male production. It was such an awesome experience to be treated with so much respect. I felt so respected, the entire time. I think you can see in the film, with our unit and our team, we’re equals. It’s very you depend on me, and I depend on you. I’ll help you, and you help me. We carry our weight, period. I am so grateful to everyone that I got to work with on this project, for giving me such an amazing experience because that is not always the case. I’m forever grateful for the entire team that treated me the way that I deserve to be treated.
The Cast of 'Valiant One' Wanted To Do the Army Justice by Portraying them Authentically
"We had an amazing military advisor."
When you’re doing something like this, that is very much outside of what people have seen you do before, do you put more pressure on yourself to do the level of work you want to do, or did you feel more pressure from knowing your family would know if you did something wrong if you weren’t really prepared?
CONDOR: I think we all felt this way, but we had a great responsibility to honor and represent the United States military and do it well and do it just and to honor what they are doing for us. They are fighting for our freedom and our safety, so the pressure came from the fact that we all didn’t want to mess that up. We wanted to do it justice. We wanted to do it authentically. We had an amazing military advisor. We had so many resources right at our fingertips to make sure that we could, to the best of our abilities, be respectful and truthful in the way that we portrayed the Army.

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What did you do to prepare for this? Was there a lot of physical training involved? Were there special skills you had to learn? What made you feel confident that you could pull this off and look authentic? Was there a day where it all came together for you?
CONDOR: That’s a great question. In terms of training, the moment the cast landed, we were immediately put into gun safety training at the gun range, to learn how to safely and respectfully handle a weapon. We did rigorous gun safety training. We did a lot of simulated scenarios of how to breach a room, how to properly be in formation, how to communicate with each other with the proper hand signals, and all these different things. We did a lot of that type of training, and it was ongoing throughout the entire movie. We were constantly in a state of training. Todd [Sharbutt], our amazing military advisor, served for 25 years in the Marines and he was on set all day long, making sure we were doing everything right.
And then, physically, I’m not gonna lie, all of our rucksacks, our guns, and everything was authentic and real because we wanted it to be as believable as possible. So, Shelby’s backpack, because she’s the medic, was filled with bandages, tourniquets, and IVs. Everything that’s actually in a proper medical kit, my bag was filled with. We had chest plates. We had everything. I was carrying 60 or 70 pounds of additional weight that I’m not used to carrying. And then, there was the helmet, which really changes your sense of gravity. It was definitely challenging, for sure, for the body to adapt to having to carry that much weight and those big boots while crawling through the dirt, running through the fields, and hiking through mountains. It was very guerrilla. We were in deep. The physical demand was definitely there for me.
'Ballerina Overdrive' Has the Most Intense Action Lana Condor Has Ever Done
"I did two workouts a day, strength and then conditioning, and then a ballet class, every day."
You’ve also done an action thriller, called Ballerina Overdrive, which sounds very physical, but also a very different kind of physicality. What was that experience like? How does the action in that compare to the action in Valiant One?
CONDOR: Ballerina Overdrive is the heaviest action I’ve ever done. It was so intense. I trained for a year for that. I lost 28 pounds for that. I did two workouts a day, strength and then conditioning, and then a ballet class, every day. It was very intense. That fighting is completely different. We’re essentially doing dance fighting, which was very, very, very different than the action that we did in Valiant One. To bridge the two, what Valiant One taught me that helped me with Ballerina Overdrive, which I’m so excited about, was physical stamina. It taught me the tools that you need to bring to work, so that your body doesn’t fall apart. On Valiant One, we brought back rollers for our muscles, and we brought tennis balls and things to stretch with. I realized that it’s so necessary if you’re doing something so physically demanding. And so, I brought all the same physical tools with me to Ballerina Overdrive because I learned you really have to protect your body when you do something like that.

Valiant One
- Release Date
- January 31, 2025
- Runtime
- 87 Minutes
- Director
- Steve Barnett
- Writers
- Steve Barnett, Eric Tipton, Daniel Myrick
Cast
-
Chase StokesCaptain Edward Brockman
-
Specialist Selby
-
Josh Weaver
-
Callan MulveyChris Lebold
Valiant One is now playing in theaters. Check out the trailer:
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