When Luke Slattery looked up at the big screen and saw superstar Joel Edgerton say of him, “I guess that little runt knew what he was doing,” it made that little runt feel 10 feet tall.

“I was like, you’re god-d*mn right I knew what I was doing!” the young Denver actor said with a hearty laugh.

The line comes at a key moment in the inspiring new George Clooney-directed film “The Boys in the Boat.” In the true tradition of classic underdog sports films, “The Boys in the Boat” tells the underknown tale of the 1936 University of Washington amateur rowing crew that somehow won the Olympic gold medal right in front of an enraged Adolph Hitler.

They weren’t even the university’s varsity rowing team. They were the backup squad. It was the Depression. None of the athletes had more than a few bucks in their pockets and a few months of training. If it didn’t really happen, Hollywood would have had to make it up. But it did.

Slattery, a 2009 graduate of Colorado Academy, plays Bob Moch, the real-life coxswain of the eight-man championship crew. The coxswain is essentially the coach in the boat. He implements strategy by coordinating the power, rhythm and speed of the rowers. He is both cheerleader and chief badgerer, barking out orders through a tiny megaphone strapped to his face.

For Slattery, that meant he shared in all of the glory – and none of the actual rowing.

“Oh yeah – the rowing was their problem,” he said with another laugh. “Rowing is a painful, excruciating, difficult sport, but I would do my best to take part in the physical training outside of rowing, just so I might earn a slight smidge of respect from the other fellas who were truly having to break their backs.”

He jokes, but Moch did play a pivotal role in the team’s success. History remembers Moch as, well, not exactly universally liked by his real-life teammates. But in the film, Moch regularly rallies the team with unorthodox strategy and inspirational quotes. There’s even a game-changing moment in song. For much of that, Slattery credits screenwriter Mark Smith.

“This guy Bob Moch was just a remarkable dude,” he said. “He was the missing ingredient. As an actor, I feel like I’m really just a conduit for this man’s actions and this writer’s words.”

“The Boys in the Boat” will surely take its place alongside “Rudy” and “Hoosiers” among beloved underdog sports films. But there is another underdog story here, and it’s how Slattery got the job in the first place.

Slattery already has more than 30 TV and film credits, including “New Amsterdam,” “The Good Doctor” and an appearance in “The Post” with Meryl Streep. But Clooney signed on to direct “The Boys in the Boat” back in March 2020 – the month everything changed. The pandemic forced the entire paradigm of Hollywood casting to shift. Gone were the days of in-person auditions and endless callbacks – replaced by what is called “the self-tape.” That’s when an actor films themselves acting out a scene or monologue at the request of a casting director and uploads it into the ether without ever leaving the apartment.

Slattery sent one to Clooney’s team, and, not surprisingly, heard nothing back. When you aren’t asked for what essentially amounts to a second job interview, that generally means the creatives have gone in another direction.

In December of 2021, Slattery flew home to surprise his mom, Parry Burnap, for her birthday when the call came from his agent. And he missed it. Why?

“Because we were making tacos,” he said.

“Just to paint the picture: The next day, I am walking the family hound, a rottweiler pit-bull mix named Louie, when I notice the message. My agents are like, ‘Hey, you should call us.’ And they tell me I got the part.” Training would begin immediately, followed by three months of shooting in the U.K.

“I remember thinking, ‘But there was no callback. I hadn’t met with anybody.”

It can’t be overstated just how unlikely it is for any actor to make a self-tape, upload it somewhere and from that alone land a role in a major film directed by George Clooney.

“I was like, ‘I must be on some sort of prank show,’” Slattery said. “But it turned out to be real.”

It was Clooney who ultimately helped Slattery make sense of his stroke (sadly, yes – pun intended) of cosmic good luck.

“George said to me, ‘A part that you don’t get was never going to you in the first place,” Slattery said. “‘But there are these writers out there who are creating characters that are just over the horizon – and they’re headed for you, but you just don’t know it yet. You can’t know it yet.’

“I think that is very liberating.”

Colorado Academy roots

Slattery is part of a remarkable entertainment pipeline that traces directly back to Colorado Academy, an independent college prep school at 3800 S. Prince St.

The International Space Station thriller “I.S.S.” (starring Ariana DeBose and directed by C.A. grad Gabriela Cowperthwaite), was released nationwide on Friday. Producer Shane Boris’ “Navalny” won the 2023 Academy Award for Best Documentary. 1988 graduate (and Tony Award nominee) Jeremy Shamos played a key role in the most recent season of “Only Murders in the Building,” alongside Meryl Streep. (And before that, on “Better Call Saul.”) Charlie Miller is the Executive Director and Curator for the DCPA’s forward-thinking immersive programming called Off-Center.

“I have to credit the teachers – Betsey Coleman, Billy Bair, Steven Scherer,” Slattery said. “The infrastructure was there for kids to support each other and to take the arts seriously, which is itself a luxury. But the teachers there were always willing to bend over backward for us.”

But the woman who had perhaps the greatest impact on Slattery’s life trajectory was recently retired Curious Theatre co-founder Dee Covington, who ran a nationally modeled teen playwriting program called Curious New Voices for two decades.

Slattery took part over three summers, learning from a roster of guest playwrights that would make college programs envious. Students would develop plays over the summer and Covington would have them directed and performed by leading artists in the Colorado theater community.

“That program was just this remarkable little gem,” Slattery said. “The way that Dee took young people’s work so seriously is such a beautiful gift to Denver. It was the coolest night every summer when we got to hear our work read by professionals on that Curious stage.”

But Slattery also shouts out Covington for another significant career milestone: “She actually gave me my first professional acting job as well,” he said. “It was in a short play written by the wise and powerful Max Posner” – a fellow Curious teen playwright now working in New York.

Slattery attended Vassar College and bounced around for a few years working “pretty much every restaurant along South Pearl Street,” he said, including Izakaya Den, The Black Pearl, Lola, Nosh Gelato and Kaos Pizzeria. “I think I was starting to devolve,” he said. So, once he had saved up 8 grand, he moved with friends to Brooklyn, where he caught a plum assignment as a journalist for the hipster film-industry news site IndieWire. He even wrote about a documentary that I make a tiny appearance in – the Denver-based film “Rolling Papers,” which is centered on the nation’s first ever daily newspaper cannabis editor, Ricardo Baca.

“I got that gig at IndieWire because I thought it would be a good way to try to break into the film industry, meet people and have my ear as close to the ground of this business as I could,” he said. “But the best part was going to screenings and interviewing filmmakers.”

One highlight: Chatting up heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson at the Tribeca Film Festival.

All aboard!

Slattery now stands on the precipice as an actor with a film that will take his national recognition into the next stratosphere. And if that’s meant to happen, he’s glad it’s happening with a fundamentally decent throwback film like “The Boys in the Boat.”

“The idea of the self-made man is a little bit of a myth,” he said. “Success takes a village. In my case, it took my teachers and my friends and my collaborators and my parents to get me here.

“And the greatest thing about rowing is that the team eclipses the individual. Always. Not everybody can be a running back or a tight end – but everybody can work hard. And I think that’s part of the appeal of ‘The Boys in the Boat.’

“Because if you think about the sport of rowing itself as a metaphor: You can only row well when you pull together. I don’t want to sound naive when I say this, but there were moments in our history where differences were put aside and we pulled together for a common goal. So how can you beat back cynicism?

“I’m just proud to be a part of something that tries to uplift. This movie has this pure-hearted impulse to give people the belief in themselves that they can overcome tremendous adversity. It’s rocket fuel for perseverance. And who couldn’t use a little of that?”