Josh Hartnett has opened up about filming some of the most dramatic scenes in his new supernatural Netflix drama Below.
The Canadian series, which jumped to the top of the streaming platform’s most-watched chart immediately upon its release earlier this month, sees Josh playing a stubborn fisherman who must protect his small Newfoundland community from a terrifying giant squid.
In a recent interview with Variety, the Verity actor was asked how he managed to cultivate such great chemistry with his aquatic co-star, despite not actually being able to see it.
Josh Hartnett on the set of the Netflix series BelowJosh confirmed that he wasn’t acting with a “tennis ball” – as is often the case for actors in Marvel movies – and was actually “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 recalled. “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 giant 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,” the Trap star 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.”
In a separate interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Josh offered up a behind-the-scenes look at how he achieved that performance in Below.
“When I’m speaking to the giant squid, or if I’m watching – I’m looking at the sea and I’m out on a ship, and there’s very little that I have to imagine,” he explained. “It’s under there.
“And so it was less CGI than it might look like from the onset.”
Speaking on Filmmaker Mixer, the show’s VFX supervisor, Matt Glover, also spoke about how his team extensively researched marine biology to create the giant squid.
“There’s a lot of features we take from a lot of different types of cephalopods and kind of bring them into one design,” he told the site.
His team started their design with the eyes, the first thing audiences see of the giant squid, and then followed up with the tentacles.
“We wanted these kind of really strong silhouette beats that, as it’s revealed slowly, you could kind of think it’s this or think it’s that, and then it’s shown for what it is,” he revealed.
To give the squid character, the creative team concentrated on the eyes to help make it more “sympathetic”.
“The eye is the window to the soul even for a giant squid. So it was important that we could bestow some intelligence in there, especially when she comes up to the submersible later,” he said.
When Below debuted in early October, it broke the record for the largest debut audience ever for a Canadian series on Netflix.
Because of this, speculation has been rife about a potential second season, which Josh has also shared his take on.
Watch all episodes of Below on Netflix now.
