This post contains spoilers for the movie 1917.

“When you stand up in No Man’s Land, you feel like you’re actually going to get shot in the head,” says Dean-Charles Chapman. He’s talking about filming Sam Mendes’s gripping—and now Academy Award Best Picture-nominated—1917, where he stars as Lance Corporal Blake, a young soldier tasked with the impossible during a pivotal moment in World War I. “Stepping on set for the first time, it felt so realistic. The trenches, the mud; it was so difficult to just even walk along. It’s such an uncomfortable feeling.”