Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Major Will Tranter, an explosive ordnance disposal specialist, in the new film Fuze, which opens with a World War 2 bomb discovered at a building site in Paddington, London. At the center of the evacuation is Tranter, who is called in to take control of the mission while police move people out of the area.
The scene is only the start of the film’s pressure cooker. A heist is happening at the same time, and Taylor-Johnson said the bomb is “a decoy for something bigger with more players involved,” which gives the story its real shape. He described the script as “a page-turning, intensely thrilling script,” and said the production worked hard to make it feel real.
That effort ran through the making of the film. Taylor-Johnson worked closely with Nick Orr, an ex-military EOD expert who still clears unexploded ordnance for humanitarian organisations, and he and director David McKenzie consulted Orr on the script, the props, the equipment, and the way the character speaks and acts. Taylor-Johnson said, “We tried to achieve authenticity in the film.”
Fuze is the second film Taylor-Johnson has made with McKenzie, and it leans on a cast built around the London emergency and criminal plots. South African actor Gugu Mamba-Raw plays Zuzanna, the police chief superintendent, while Theo James plays Karalis, the leader of a crew of bank robbers. Saffron Hocking appears as Military Sergeant Dootsie Keane, and Elham Eshasa plays Taylor-Johnson’s interpreter in Afghanistan.
The setup gives Fuze a straightforward hook and a more complicated engine underneath it. A bomb prompts the evacuation, but the story keeps circling back to the idea that the device is only cover for a wider operation. That is the tension Taylor-Johnson and McKenzie seem to have built the film around: a public emergency in London on one side, and a criminal plan unfolding in the same breath on the other.
For Taylor-Johnson, the draw was not only the role but the mechanics behind it. He said of the project, “I’m Aaron Taylor-Johnson and I play Major Will Tranter in the film Fuze,” and his comments suggest the film is aiming to sell both the spectacle and the procedure. If it lands, it will be because the audience believes the bomb squad response just enough to be pulled into the larger scheme around it.
