�鶹��Ƶ

If the acting and dialogue in the White House Situation Room during the new Netflix movie A House of Dynamite seem authentic, you can thank the . Specifically, , executive director of the Schar School’s  at �鶹��Ƶ.

In another life, for two years, Pfeiffer actually was the senior director of President Obama’s “SitRoom.” 

Pfeiffer, the former chief of staff of the CIA and who also worked at the NSA, knows how to keep a secret. He told no one at George �鶹��Ƶ about his role in director Kathyrn Bigelow’s (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) latest thriller for more than a year until Rebecca Ferguson, the Swedish actor from the Mission: Impossible and Dune franchises, began singing Pfeiffer’s praises in global media.

“They hooked me up with Larry Pfeiffer,” she told the Times of London—a�Ի� Vanity Fair, and IndieWire, and Tudum, the Netflix magazine—as well as in several promotional panel discussions. “He was the man. He’s basically the guy who Jason Clarke plays [in the film]. He’d been that guy, and he was on set every day.”

Ferguson plays Captain Olivia Walker, Situation Room senior duty officer. Clarke is Admiral Mark Miller, the senior director of the “SitRoom,” reporting to the president, played by Idris Elba. The real-time drama arises when a nuke of “indeterminate origin” makes its way through the skies toward Chicago, giving those in charge of saving the world a mere 19 minutes to respond.

After the producers reached out to Pfeiffer on the recommendation of another consultant, “we did a Zoom call during which I asked if they’d ever visited the real Situation Room,” Pfeiffer said. “When they said they hadn’t, I suggested I could ask the then-incumbent senior director if a tour could be arranged. After a couple weeks of deliberation, they invited us in.”

This entre into a remarkably secure national security facility heightened the film’s realism when it came time to build the set. “The production crew did an amazing job recreating the Situation Room, but also the hallways leading to it, the Oval Office, the press briefing room—even the Navy Mess where we would line up to get our meals,” Pfeiffer said.

In fact, “the ‘SitRoom’ felt so real that one time during production, I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket and for a moment I felt pangs of guilt as if I had brought my phone into a secure facility”—a major violation of security protocol.

As for Ferguson and the other actors, director Bigelow “gave me wide latitude to help them shape their characters and their actions,” he said. “I also offered suggestions to the script. Her remit to me was to help her make it as real as possible.”

Feguson’s main takeaway seems to be a comment she’s repeated several times: Pfeiffer told her, “You never lose your [euphemism for cool] in the Situation Room,” she has said. That led to at least one scene being added when Ferguson, as Walker, feels compelled to do just that—walk out of the scene. Bigelow understood the motivation and did the scene again, this time with a camera following Walker out as she loses her cool and works to regain her composure.

“Rebecca Ferguson was a delight to work with,” Pfeiffer said. “She was down to earth and very friendly, eager to learn as quickly as possible what the role of a senior duty officer was, how they would walk and talk, what actions would they be doing at their desk, on their computer, with their phone and headset, how they related to other members of the ‘SitRoom’ team and to the high-level officials she would be dealing with, like the president.”

She also probed him on “what would be their motivation, what made them want to do a job like this? During breaks between filming, she didn’t shuttle off to a trailer or dressing room, she wanted to sit over a meal or a snack and pick my brain,” he said.

Pfeiffer has seen a rough cut of the film in July and attended a private screening earlier this month—the movie is in theaters now; it premieres on Netflix October 24—a�Ի� said “it’s very good, the suspense kept me on the edge of my seat—a�Ի� I had read the script and participated in the filming.

“I was especially happy at how Kathryn [Bigelow] captured the dedication, professionalism, and patriotism of the men and women of the Situation Room and the military, even under the worst of circumstances.”