Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell take to the skies in trailer for Korean War epic Devotion

Jonathan Majors was determined to properly prepare for his role as pioneering Black U.S. Navy aviator Jesse L. Brown in the '50s-set Devotion (whose new trailer you can exclusively see below) no matter how ill it made him feel.

"I call it the dog s--- reality," says the Loki and The Harder They Fall actor. "You know, getting in the plane, trying to hold your lunch down, your breakfast down, sweating bullets, blacking out in the flight. I refused to take Dramamine because they didn't have it [back then]. I refused to come down. They were like, 'Are you sick?' 'Yeah, I'm sick as a dog.' 'Do you want to come down?' 'No, I don't want to go down. Keep going!' Because you want to experience it."

Directed by JD Dillard (2016's Sleight), and based on real events, Devotion hinges around the friendship between Brown and a white aviator, Tom Hudner, which developed in the lead up to the Korean War. Hudner is played by Glen Powell (a.k.a. Hangman from Top Gun: Maverick) who started developing the project five years ago after reading Adam Makos' 2014 book Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice.

"A couple of different people had mentioned the book," says Powell, one of the film's executive producers. "I ended up going on a fishing trip with my family and everybody was reading Devotion. My uncle had read it, my cousins were reading it, my dad was about to read it, and I picked it up. We got to talk about this story, and what it meant, and the fact that this was a war that no one knew about, a relationship that no one knew about."

After Powell was cast in Top Gun: Maverick, the actor initially believed he would have to choose between the two plane-oriented movies but instead decided to pursue both projects.

"Really, these movies could not be more different," he says. "But at the same time I think they pair quite wonderfully together in terms of the legacy of naval aviation."

Director Dillard has a familial connection to the subject through his father, a former real-life U.S. Navy airman. The filmmaker resolved to shoot as much of the aerial footage as possible for real, although locating enough Korean War-era planes proved tricky.

"When I first met the producers and told them that we had to [shoot] in-camera the first problem is, well, where are the planes coming from?" the filmmaker says, with a laugh. "Finding eighty-year old-planes that are still in working order, that can withstand the sort of stress the we're going to put them through was certainly a task, but at the end of the day we had a hangar full of them. It adds a level of realism to put our camera jet ten feet away from these flying museums and lens them up for real with the beautiful backdrop of clouds at 10,000 feet."

Majors explains that he was attracted to the idea of playing a military character.

"All the men in my family have served in the U.S. armed forces. Navy. Army. Airforce," says the actor. "I myself haven't. But there's something about the soldier archetype that's always kind of been with me."

The film's cast also includes Joe Jonas, Thomas Sadoski, and Christina Jackson, who portrays Jesse Brown's wife Daisy.

"She's the person that Jesse is able to really sit down and unwind with and really talk about what he's going through," says the actress of her character. "Because he is the only Black navy aviator at the time."

While the film is set both in America and a diverse array of foreign locales, Dillard shot most of the movie in Georgia.

"It was quite an interesting challenge, making Savannah look like, you know, North Korea, China, Rhode Island, a ship in the middle of the sea and Cannes," he says. "We certainly were resourceful in trying to figure that out. Then a lot of our aerial work was in the mountains of Washington State and this allowed us the frozen tundra landscape to double for the mountains of the China-Korea border."

The film is both epic and intimate as Hudner learns he has to go that extra mile, and maybe some more, for his friendship with Brown to really mean anything.

"What is it to actually partner with somebody? What is actual ally-ship? What does it actually look like?" says Majors, talking about the still-relevant questions raised by the film. "It's not writing something on a piece of paper, it's not doing a YouTube chat or a TikTok or whatever the f--- you want to put out in the world to show it. It is an experience. [It is] I'm with you, bro, come hell or high water. I don't want someone who's just with me when things are easy or fun. I want someone that's going to get in the mud with me as I intend to get get in the mud with them."

Actress Christina Jackson recalls that the experience of seeing the finished movie was a moving one.

"To actually see it all together, it was absolutely beautiful," she says, her voice cracking over the phone. "I'm tearing up. It was absolutely beautiful to see it on the screen. I sat and cried for 20 minutes in the theater. I was really really proud of what we put together in a way that I could not have expected."

Devotion is written by Jake Crane and Jonathan A.H. Stewart. The film screens at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival, and is scheduled for release in cinemas on Nov. 23.

Exclusively see new trailer and poster for Devotion below.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more

Related content:

• The Harder They Fall star Jonathan Majors on how the twist ending represents 'the circle of life'
• Ready for takeoff! We drank 3 rounds with the hotshot cast of Top Gun: Maverick
• The sky's the limit for Top Gun: Maverick hotshot Glen Powell