Kate Mara did ‘boot camp’ for ‘Class of 09’ thriller: ‘It was very funny’

Kate Mara stars as an FBI agent who gets in over her head in the new FBI thriller “Class of ’09” — and she had some training for the role, she said. 

“The first day we all met in person, we actually had sort of an actors’ physical boot camp experience,” Mara, 40, told The Post. 

“We had a few weeks of prep where we did physical training and weapons training.”

“Class of ’09,” premiering May 10 on Hulu, was created by Tom Rob Smith (“The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story”) and follows a class of up-and-coming FBI trainees through three different timelines. 

In the past (2009), they’re a group of recruits from non-traditional fields who are going through the FBI training program.

The group includes Ashley Poet, aka Poet (Mara), a former nurse with a gift for empathy; smart and thoughtful Tayo (Brian Tyree Henry), who left behind a career in insurance; Lennix (Brian J. Smith), who’s taking a divergent path from working in politics like the rest of his family; and Hour (Sepideh Moafi), the daughter of Iranian academics who were exiled for their interest in history. 

“I couldn’t partake [in the boot camp] because I had just had hernia surgery,” said Mara. 

“I was able to jog, but I wasn’t able to do the situps and things that involve your abs.” 

Although she was unable to participate in all of the physical activities, Mara said that watching her castmates go through it was “very funny.” 

This was in part because her co-star Brian J. Smith (“Sense8”) got a little overzealous.

“Part of what we did was the fit test … you have to run a certain length,” Smith, 41, told The Post. “And true to the character I was playing, I wanted to impress everybody and be like the ultimate FBI guy.”

“So, I was like ‘Watch how fast I can run!’ and I lost my breakfast, I’ll put it that way. I was not feeling too hot.” 

Timelines in the present (2023) and future (2034) also catch up with the characters later in their divergent careers: Poet has become a skilled undercover agent, Tayo has a high position in the FBI, Lennix and Poet are exes with a friendly but uneasy professional relationship and Hour and Poet haven’t talked in years.

To make matters more complicated, in the future timeline, AI plays a major role in the criminal justice system, with which the formerly idealistic Tayo seems oddly comfortable.

“Often you get roles where you explore a character at a certain point in their lives,” Moafi, 37, told The Post. 

“You might get to ponder or daydream ‘What was this character like in their 20s? What will they be like in their 50s or 60s?’ But to see that play out onscreen and stretch into that was a unique undertaking was very exciting to me. And the character that I get to explore, Hour, is — like all the characters — nuanced and complicated and pure and beautiful in ways, and sort of tortured and flawed.

“It’s always more fun to play people who have flaws than to play someone who is straightforward.” 

Mara said that she enjoyed playing the younger versions of their characters in the 2009 timeline the most.

“Because they’re more hopeful, less jaded, and just sort of more pure,” she said. “And that’s when most of our bonding happened, because it’s when all of our characters are all together. So, that’s when we got to know each other.”