Heroes who thwarted French train attack will play themselves in Clint Eastwood film

The three California men who thwarted a terror attack on a French train in 2015 will make the rare move of playing themselves in a Clint Eastwood-directed film about their heroics, a studio announced Tuesday.

Airman 1st Class Spencer Stone, Oregon National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos and civilian Anthony Sadler, all childhood friends from California, will star in The 15:17 to Paris, a film based on the book they co-wrote about taking down a terrorist, Warner Brothers said in a statement.

The film, which began production this week, follows the lives of the three friends from childhood to the evening when they helped subdue the man who opened fire inside a train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris.

The Sacramento-area men were vacationing in Europe when they tackled Ayoub El-Khazzani, a man who authorities said has ties to radical Islam. El-Khazzani had boarded the Paris-bound train with a Kalashnikov rifle, pistol and box cutter.

A fourth man, 62-year-old Briton Chris Norman, also helped disarm the attacker.

The film will be the latest of several about real-life heroes that Eastwood has taken on, including 2014’s American Sniper, and 2016’s Sully. But the leads in those films were played by Oscar-nominee Bradley Cooper and Oscar-winner Tom Hanks, respectively, not their actual subjects.