Arts & Entertainment

'15:17 To Paris' Train Hero Who Stopped Terror Attack Speaks

Alek Skarlatos, Anthony Sadler, and Spencer Stone play themselves in Clint Eastwood's new movie about how they stopped a terror attack.

LOS ANGELES, CA – It’s late June last year and Alek Skarlatos is back in Los Angeles with his friends Anthony Sadler and Spencer Stone. They have yet another meeting set up with Clint Eastwood, who is directing the movie about the trio’s heroic actions two years earlier that stopped a terror attack on a train to Paris.

The three — Skarlatos, a member of the Oregon National Guard on vacation after being deployed in Afghanistan; Stone, an Air Force medic on leave from his base in Portugal, and Sadler, a senior at Cal State-Sacramento — had been headed to Paris from Amsterdam when a shirtless man with an assault rifle, a pistol and hundreds of rounds of ammunition stepped out of the train’s bathroom.

They stopped the attack before it began.

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Filming on the “The 15:17 to Paris” is scheduled to begin in about three weeks and the three of them — childhood friends now in their mid-20s — figure it’s just another meeting to go over some of the details of what had happened. The cast had been announced.

They were looking forward to meeting the people who would play them.

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It turned out that they already knew the people who would play them.

“We had been down to Los Angeles four or five times already,” Skarlatos remembers. “We figured it was more of the same. We assumed that Mr. Eastwood wanted us to meet the actors, talk to them about what had happened.

“We’re sitting around and Mr. Eastwood tells us that he’s thinking of using a new, small experimental camera and he asks us to reenact what had happened.

“For the actors? we ask him.

“Just do it for me and the crew.”

Skarlatos says he and his friends did as asked.

Afterward, Eastwood springs a surprise on them.

“He asks us if we would be willing to play ourselves and we were like, sure, why not?”

Quickly, though, they had some second thoughts.

“We were very worried,” Skarlatos says. “It seems that he was taking a very big risk.

“But Mr. Eastwood had a lot of confidence in us.”

The professional actors were out. The heroes would play themselves.

The 15:17 to Paris

It was Aug. 21, 2015, and three hours into their trip aboard the 15:17 train from Amsterdam to Paris, Skarlatos sees a man later identified as 25-year-old Ayoub El-Khazzani walk out of the bathroom. He doesn’t have a shirt on. He is carrying an automatic weapon.

“I will always remember that,” he says. “Seeing the AK.”

He tapped Spencer on the shoulder, tells him, “Let’s go.”

Along with Stone, Sadler and a British man named Chris Norman, Skarlatos rushes the armed man. As Sadler grabs him from behind, Skarlatos takes the man’s pistol and uses it to beat the man unconscious. The entire incident played out over a few minutes. Just over 30 minutes later, they were in Paris. El-Khazzani, who they’d tied up, was handed over to French police.

While one man was shot, there was no doubt that the three of them had saved lives. They were honored by the French and United States governments. Skarlatos ended up on “Dancing with the Stars.” He finished third.

“It’s been nuts,” Skarlatos says of the aftermath and his life since.

While Skarlatos was in Paris after a tour of duty in Afghanistan, he was a small-town guy who had grown up outside of Sacramento in a city of just about 30,000 people. From there he went to Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon — a city of barely 20,000 people.

“Honestly, I don’t feel that I’ve changed that much,” he says. “My circumstances certainly have but in the end, I’m just me.

“The key has been that through this all, I’ve been going through it with my two best friends. We do a good job of keeping each other humble, grounded.”

“Let’s Do It,” He Said

It was June 4, 2016, and Skarlatos, Sadler and Stone were at the Sony Pictures Studio in Culver City, California, where they were being honored at the “Guys Choice Awards” presented by Spike TV. They were getting the “Hero” award for their actions on the train.

The presenter was Clint Eastwood.

“We had grown up watching his movies,” Skarlatos says. “We would go over to Spencer’s house — he had a bunch of his movies — and watch ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,’ and ‘Hang ‘Em High’ and more. He was a hero and we loved his movies.

“We were in the green room after the awards and we were talking with him. We were joking around that we had a book coming out and that he should do the movie.”

The three of them had been working with a writer to turn their story into a book, “The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Heroes,” that came out last month.

“Mr. Eastwood said, ‘send it to me.’ ” Skarlatos says. “We thought he was being nice but Spencer sent him the book before it came out and after a while, we heard back.

"‘Let’s do it,’ he said. He wanted to make the movie.”

“Never Be Afraid”

Skarlatos and his friends were in Paris last week for a special screening of the film.

“It’s definitely unusual to see yourself on screen,” he says. “It’s perhaps more so when it is you watching yourself acting out your own story. The first time we saw the movie, it was honestly pretty strange and we were very critical of ourselves.

“The second time, we knew what to expect and it was a lot more enjoyable. We knew it would be fantastic.”

For now, Skarlatos is looking forward to things settling down a little and relaxing at home, a new place he’s bought in Roseburg.

“I love working,” he says. “ But, if I’m working, I’m not at home and I love my home.

“I’m looking forward to just being there, relaxing, playing video games, and doing stuff around the house.”

Skarlatos says while he looks forward to that moment, his appearances on “Dancing with the Stars” and in the movie have whetted his appetite for acting.

“I really feel that I’ve been given this great opportunity in which I got to learn from one of the absolute best,” he says of working with Eastwood. “It would be a shame not to see what it could lead to.”

Another thing he is looking forward to is more time on the road, giving talks.

“Before all of this, I was really afraid to speak in public,” he says. “What has happened is that I’ve learned that you need to make the most of each day. I didn’t die on the train that day.

“Whatever fears I had in my head, went away. I realized that every day is gravy.”

It’s a message that Skarlatos wants to share with people.

“Sometimes I go out there on my own and sometimes with the others,” he says. “I really hope with the movie some of those opportunities increase because the three of us, I think, have a good message to share.

“It’s important to make the most of each day. And people don’t need to go through a terrorist attack to realize that.”

Skarlatos says that in the end, the important thing is for people to not be afraid.

“I really am the same person that I was,” he says. “My friends and family do a good job of keeping me centered and humbled. I think that people, in general, need to remember that you don’t know what life will bring you or what the future holds.

“You should always keep learning and never be afraid to try new things.”

Photo of Alex Skarlatos, Spencer Stone, and Anthony Sadler courtesy Skarlatos.

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