Reel Team 6: How ‘Six’ turned a group of actors into believable Navy SEALs

In “Six,” the eight-episode drama series premiering tonight on History, the members of SEAL Team Six ventures out on a mission to kill a Taliban leader in Afghanistan—a mission that goes awry when they discover a U.S. citizen working with terrorists. The story may be fictional but the actors must be believable Navy SEALs. The person taking on this challenge is retired Navy SEAL and television producer Mitchell Hall.

SEAL Team Six—formally known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group—are the elite of the elite. This is the unit that killed Osama Bin Laden and it is not easy to join. First, 75% of candidates who go through basic SEAL training do not qualify to become SEALs. Those who make it can serve on SEAL Teams for several years before they are nominated as candidates for the Six, which eliminates more than half of those candidates.

The SEALs who make it through are the kind of invincible people that Hall must teach his actors to emulate. “It shows Six’s pedigree,” said Hall, who served with the team for five years during a 21-year career in Naval Special Warfare that included deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Accurately portraying the methods, equipment, and operations of SEAL Team Six is ​​difficult enough. Hall admits that conveying the complexity of the decisions its operators must make is probably impossible. “It was an imperfect effort by imperfect soldiers with imperfect policies and often unclear guidance.”

But Hall, along with series creator David Broyles (another military special operations veteran) and Academy Award nominee William Broyles, were determined to try and correct Hollywood’s habit of frequently the mistake of a more elite military. To achieve that authenticity, they basically put the cast through basic SEAL training and tactical training.