10 More War Movie Actors Who Were Actually There

4. Rob Riggle - 12 Strong

Rob Riggle 12 Strong
Warner Bros.

Saturday Night Live alum and regular comedy actor Rob Riggle has been a regular fixture of the small and big screens for over two decades now, and until 2021 he balanced that career while also being a Marine Corps reservist.

Riggle enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1992 and saw deployments across multiple countries, including Liberia, Kosovo (where he received the Combat Action Ribbon), and Afghanistan. Riggle also partook in the USO in Iraq while his acting and stand-up career took off, only fully retiring from the Reserve in 2021.

While most well-known for his work on SNL, The Daily Show, and films like Talladega Nights and The Other Guys, Riggle has made the occasional foray into the dramatic. One such occasion was 12 Strong, a 2018 film based on Doug Stanton's book, Horse Soldiers, which told the story of U.S. special forces troops operating in Afghanistan immediately after 9/11.

Riggle portrayed the real-life Lieutenant Colonel Max Bowers in the film, who was the commanding officer of the 5th Special Forces Group. Riggle actually met the real-life Bowers while deployed in Afghanistan too, which he discussed while speaking to The Hollywood Reporter: "It's a small world and interesting that it's come full circle like this and that I'm actually playing my old boss."

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.