There’s a mysterious entity lurking beneath Newfoundland’s ocean, and it’s up to Josh Hartnett to find out what’s going on.
In a newly released teaser trailer for Below, we meet Calvin (Hartnett), a fisherman whose small village is under attack by a violent creature. As locals succumb to mayhem brought on by strange events, and Calvin’s son Wade (Charlie Heaton) starts exhibiting terrifying new symptoms, our hero teams up with Fonda (Mackenzie Davis), a marine biologist, to uncover what secrets lie beneath the water.
“I read the first two scripts so quickly, in less than an hour,” Hartnett tells Tudum. “The voice was so clear, the concept was so engaging, and the character was fantastic. I’d never read anything like it before.”
The show, which was shot on location in Newfoundland, was born out of creator Jesse McKeown’s affection for the Canadian province. “It’s such a unique landscape and so rugged, dangerous, isolated, and scary in a lot of ways,” he shares. “But then there’s also this other side to it — the community is so warm, and the people are so funny, and there are many eccentricities about the place.”
To properly capture Newfoundland’s way of life, Hartnett and Heaton put boots on the ground and immersed themselves in the culture.
“[One of the actors] and I went off with a couple of lobsters, a pot, grabbed some water out of the sea, and he told me all these stories,” Hartnett recalls. “He had so much knowledge of the history of the island and the people; listening to him speak helped a lot.”
To master the regional accent, Hartnett listened daily to a local radio station that featured fishermen discussing their trade. Heaton hung out in bars outside Newfoundland’s capital, St. John’s, soaking in the culture. “When you meet Newfoundlanders, they want to bring you in, and they want to look after you,” Heaton says. “I remember on day one, my driver said, ‘Let me know if you want me to bring supper around later. I live down the road.’”
Continues Heaton, “I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘Oh, I’ll just bring you supper, it’s no problem.’”
The team forwent green screen and filmed scenes on Newfoundland’s ocean to capture the real-life locale. “We were out with the Coast Guard on the water, driving these boats, and I’m actually out in the ocean kayaking,” Heaton says. “I’ve done a lot of work on practical locations in Stranger Things, but I’ve never been out on the ocean like that, which is insane.”
Davis also found herself in uncharted territory. “Josh and I were like two buddy cops solving a mystery. I’ve never done that in anything else … I like being in that world so much.”
She adds, “Below is a show I’d want to watch. I want to watch shows that are funny and scary and smart and propulsive and have a brain behind them. It has all those things, which is rarer than you might think.”
