Few could have predicted the global success that Below would have when it premiered on Netflix earlier this month.
The supernatural Canadian miniseries follows a tight-knit fishing community in Newfoundland whose lives are threatened by a mysterious sea creature.
Josh Hartnett leads the series as Calvin Penney, a fisherman who becomes determined to protect his friends and family, including his son, Wade, played by Stranger Things star Charlie Heaton.
Since it debuted, the show has consistently been found at the top of the platform’s most-watched chart around the world, and has sparked a whole lot of conversation along the way.
So, whether you’ve developed an unexpected fondness for the giant squid, have fallen in love with Snooks Arm or just need to know how the cast mastered those accents, check out our round-up of behind-the-scenes facts about Below…
Below really filmed in Newfoundland – and many members of both the cast and crew were native to the community
Many of the actors in Below originally came from Newfoundland and its surrounding areas.
“Most of the people who worked on it, beyond the acting side of it, were from the local area as well. We had this real sense of being immersed in the culture,” Josh Hartnett told Sharp magazine.
The Pearl Harbor actor expanded on the experience of making the drama in the community it’s based in.
“That’s a wonderful thing to have happen when you’re shooting on location and you’re given the gift of being brought in as a member of the community. They show you how to live that life without even having to really show it to you,” he revealed.
Below creator Jesse McKeown has family from Newfoundland, so much of the show is based on his own lived reality
Jesse McKeown’s wife and in-laws are originally from Newfoundland, which inspired him when putting the show together, lead actor Josh told Sharp.
“He wanted to write a story that surrounded this group of people who’d been marginalised for a long time, pushed around by the government, pushed around by the larger corporations in the fishing world that have kind of sidelined not only this group of people, but this whole way of life that existed up in Newfoundland for hundreds of years,” Josh explained.
The Trap actor added that the writer “fell in love” with the culture of the area and “wanted to write something for the Newfoundland fishing community”.
“There are a number of reasons why I think I always wanted to make something there,” he continued. “It was that kind of crazy contrast between how unforgiving and scary the landscape was, and just how warm and fun and inviting the people and the community were,” Jesse also told Canada Press.
Resettlement, which causes conflict within Snooks Arm, was a real-life government scheme in the 1950s and 1970s that saw residents receive financial support for leaving the isolated community.
The real-life Snook’s Arm was resettled in 2018, when its last 10 people took the deal.
“So many families now are directly affected by resettlement,” Jesse told Canada Press. “If you spend any time there, or if you grew up there, that image of the house floating on the ocean is a key image.”
Below’s ‘flamingo story’ was one part of the show that was inspired by real events
At the start of Below, a flamingo appeared and was shot. In the drama, this was the beginning of the supernatural goings on – but it was based on something that happened in real life, too.
“It was my wife’s neighbor, a guy named Mark Ferguson, who works at the museum in St. John’s, Newfoundland, called The Rooms,” showrunner Jesse recalled to What’s On Netflix.
“He told me that story about the flamingo, how a flamingo had shown up in Newfoundland somehow and that some random person shot it, and now the flamingo is in the museum.
“I went and looked at the flamingo. I saw it!”
This apparently triggered something in the writer, who felt it was an “interesting detail about when things start going wonky with our environment”.
“How does a pink flamingo from the Caribbean end up in Newfoundland?” Jesse asked himself. “So as fantastical as this series gets – and when you see the rest, you’ll see it gets pretty crazy – it all came from something. It all came from real Newfoundland history or folklore that’s been around there for a long time.”
The ‘sea hag’, meanwhile, took inspiration from something more fantastical
Below’s “sea hag” was actually inspired by a personal experience the drama’s producer Jessica McKown had.
“I’ve had sleep paralysis. I didn’t know it was called the old hag, but I used to get it quite a bit when I was younger, more as a teenager and in my 20s,” she explained to Variety.
She continued: “I think it was stress-related or something, but I had a version of this female creature in my room who would watch me sleep and climb and then I found out it was a thing.”
Jessica then discovered that mythology can cross culture, as the hag is a very popular piece of folklore from Newfoundland.
“So I wanted to build on it. I do think it is Wade is under stress and he’s got all these problems. So it’s very plausible that it was something psychological, but then it turns out not to be,” she said about transferring her bad dream into Wade’s world.
Josh Hartnett had a lot of help to perfect his Newfoundland accent for Below
Below showcases the unusual Newfoundland accent, something that has been widely discussed by audiences and critics.
“It was like a little bit Irish, it was a little bit Canadian, it was a little bit middle-American… and also just a little bit sort of Cornwall,” Josh said while explaining the unique dialect to The Hollywood Reporter.
Josh said that he had help on set to step in if his accent started “going south” or “too Irish”, and he is very much aware that some audience members may struggle to adjust to it.
“I knew when we started, as we all did, [the accent] is going to be jarring to the public when they first hear it,” he said, but felt that he couldn’t “really [do] a service to the story” without it – “so we decided to really go for it”.
To help him get into the accent and dialect required of his Below character, Josh listened to a long-running Canadian radio show called The Broadcast, which featured guests with different versions of the Newfoundland accent.
The Verity actor told Men’s Health that he also worked with a dialect coach to ensure he and the actors who played his family sounded like they were from the same place.
“We did a lot of this work together, and everybody on set was incredibly helpful,” he recounted. “Nobody made fun of us. Everybody really wanted us to show their world in a good light.”
Josh Harnett also went on trips with real-life fishermen to get ready for Below
Josh grew up in Minnesota, a landlocked American state. While he had been on boats and docked them before being cast in Below, these were on lakes. So, to help him with his latest project, he had to take out a small craft license.
“I had to take out a subsequent number of bigger vessels, and then I had to be able to learn all the codes of the water, which of course is like learning the signage on the side of the road when you’re learning to drive,” he revealed to Variety.
Last June, Josh also went on a small boat with fishermen to get a feel for their work.
“And we’re in this tiny Zodiac, which is no longer than 20 feet. It’s very small and made of rubber and plastic,” the Black Hawk Down actor explained. “It’s fibreglass, maybe, but it’s very light.
“These giant humpbacks, a pod of them came up and around us and started breaching and started waving.”
He added: “It was an immediate understanding of our position out on the water as being precarious, but also the majesty of the ocean ecosystem that I don’t think I had any understanding of before I got there. It was like this perfect aha moment where I realised, ‘OK, this is what these people feel in communion with when they’re out there on a daily basis’.”
A ‘will-they-won’t-they’ romance was almost added to the Below script
Below’s executive producers Jesse McKeown and Jessica Rhoades originally came to Josh, their future leading man, with a script that saw Calvin and Dr. Fonda have a purely platonic relationship.
“When we started, I thought, ‘How refreshing is it that there are these two leads of the show and we aren’t playing with that notion’,” Josh told Variety. “That this is two people that are in the hunt together. We kept comparing ourselves to the crowd on Scooby-Doo, we’re coming together to figure this story out.”
Around three or four episodes in, Jessica came up to Josh and told him: “You know, there’s something happening here between you guys. We have to resolve it some way.”
“Both Mackenzie [Davis] and I [agreed], ‘Well, it can’t be romantic. It doesn’t make any sense’.”
Eventually, “through the course of the story”, it was suggested that “maybe they have sort of gone through a transformation and maybe there is room for” romance between them.,
“But we didn’t go anywhere with it, which was good. It works really well that way,” Josh confirmed.
In her own separate interview with Variety, Jessica confirmed the relationship between the duo was never part of the plan.
“We cast Josh and Mackenzie and we all decided it was more about these two coming out of their shells and being able to communicate with someone, and coming out of isolation and we were playing with so many of those themes,” she explained.
She added: “And then the two of them just up and had some chemistry, and we had to contend with it.
“There’s a moment obviously in the end where I dare you to not be rooting for them, but it just happened. You just want those two kids together, don’t you?”
A great amount of research went into creating Below’s squid character
The production team behind Below spoke to experts at the real Ocean Sciences Centre in Newfoundland to understand how cephalopods look and behave.
“There’s a long and rich history of Architeuthis dux, the North Atlantic giant squid, in that area of Newfoundland,” the showrunner said to Variety. “That’s where all the original discoveries happened.
“So the giant squid is very important to the history and mythology of Newfoundland.”
Jessica also explained to the outlet how the VFX team worked to create the mysterious giant squid.
“There is so much time modeling and doing scales and being able to figure out boats, houses, ships, all of those things,” she said. “Everything had to be so precise to get the scale of her right.”
“You don’t want it to be silly, obviously, but you want it to be fun, but it had to be scary,” she expanded. “I think one of our biggest challenges was like the scope of the eye outside of the submersible, just getting those things right.”
Josh Hartnett had his own methods for building chemistry with the squid in Below
When Variety asked the Sin City actor how he built chemistry with the squid – something that he could not actually see on set – he opened up about the challenge.
Josh confirmed that he wasn’t acting with a “tennis ball” (as is often the case in CGI-heavy productions) and was instead “mostly just acting to the sea, like a crazy person out there on a boat speaking to the sea”.
“They’d be like, ‘Could you look a little bit further right when you do the speech?’,” he claimed. “But it’s speaking to something internal that I felt connected to. It was more conceptual than it was thinking of it being a squid.”
Josh gave the interviewer some insight into his acting process – even if his co-star is a CGI mythological squid.
“I do this a lot when I’m working, where I am transposing pieces of my own life onto characters’ lives to give it context within me, so that I feel like it’s living,” he explained. “Then I let that go and just go for it and use the text. In this, I used a few different corollaries, but the squid was never a squid in my mind. It was something deeper.”
Below showrunner Jesse McKeown was always set on the show’s final shot
Jesse told Variety that the idea for closing on an image of an iceberg was there from the very first outline for the show.
“I think in some ways it is a happy ending for Calvin and his family, but it’s a reprieve,” he stated. “They get to live to fight another day, and so it was important not to turn away from the real catastrophe that’s heading for us.”
Jessica praised Jesse’s writing, and the way he managed to make Calvin’s story come full circle.
“I think it’s so beautifully built with what Jesse built in the first episode. Calvin’s looking out for himself and his family, and says ‘When those icebergs come rolling in, you know who to call’,” she enthused. “She obviously is ahead of him in this tale, and what those mean, to be able to take it all the way to its ending. It just felt perfect.”
Josh Hartnett was also involved in a car accident during production of Below
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Josh revealed that he had been involved in a car crash when returning home from the set of Below.
“We got hit – my driver and I – coming home from work at like one o’clock in the morning,” he said. “[We] got T-boned by a police car running a red light. They hit us very fast.”
Everyone was, thankfully, alright, although the driver did suffer some whiplash as a result.
“The miracle of the side-impact air bag was – because it hit just in front of my door and broke the axle of our car and smashed in our engine,” Josh added. “[The police officer] had bull bars on the front of his car, and they all went up. Broke the front end of his car, and it was just very close, but we were OK.”
Below is available to stream in full now on Netflix.
