For Austin Abrams, playing a diver trapped inside a whale meant spending 40 filming days inside a built version of the animal. The mouth and stomach environments in Whalefall were practical sets, according to Rolling Stone’s new interview with Abrams and director Brian Duffield, published in its Australian edition on October 19.
That is a wonderfully strange answer to a familiar filmmaking question: how do you give an actor something convincing to react to when the location is impossible to visit? Here, the production built the nightmare around him.
One diver, one whale, one shrinking air supply
20th Century Studios’ official synopsis introduces Jay Gardiner, played by Abrams, as a young man diving off California while searching for his late father’s remains. A sperm whale swallows him, leaving him with roughly an hour of oxygen and a particularly unpleasant escape problem.
Josh Brolin plays his father, Mitt. Duffield directed the adaptation and co-wrote it with Daniel Kraus, the author of the novel. The film opened in U.S. theaters on October 16. This is a fictional survival thriller, rather than a dramatization of a documented rescue.
The cramped spaces were actually cramped
Disney’s October 15 production account supplies an important detail about those sets: Duffield says they were not enlarged beyond the spaces viewers see. Abrams really was working inside a compact enclosure, giving the claustrophobia a physical foundation.
The stomach sequences were filmed in story order. Abrams explained that following Jay’s progression helped him track the character’s changing emotional state. That choice matters in a film where a great deal has to register through one person’s reactions.
The filmmakers consulted whale anatomist Joy Reidenberg about the digestive tract, stomach acid and diving equipment, while Wētā Workshop helped develop materials for the interior environments. That research informed the fiction; it does not turn the movie into evidence that someone could survive its scenario.
Physical construction also does not mean every image in the film was achieved without visual effects. The specific claim here concerns the built mouth and stomach sets.
Sometimes the usable shot lasted only 36 frames
In a separate October 16 interview with TheWrap, Duffield described how the technical difficulty shaped the edit. At times, a take yielded only 36 usable frames of Abrams; water on the lens or another problem spoiled the rest.
The film also changed when an unexpected scene partner started working particularly well: a jellyfish. Duffield said Abrams’ response to it was so effective that he and editor Pietro Scalia increased its presence. An element that had not been the original center of attention became more important through performance and editing.
That is the less tidy side of practical filmmaking. Building the environment gives performers something immediate, but it also creates obstacles a screenplay cannot fully anticipate. The finished sequence has to emerge from the material the crew actually captured.
The whale is the location
Kraus’ October 14 conversation with The Film Stage makes a useful distinction: the whale functions as a setting, not a villain. His comparison to Gravity points toward survival in an overwhelming environment rather than a monster choosing its next victim.
For Abrams, preparation also included visiting sperm whales off Dominica, Rolling Stone reports. The actor wanted a real encounter with the animals before making a movie centered on one. The production then supplied a much less relaxing kind of immersion: weeks inside its constructed version.
The hook is not simply that Whalefall has an outrageous premise. It is the practical commitment behind it: an actor, a tight physical space, and a crew finding ways to make that space tell a story.
Featured image: Austin Abrams as Jay Gardiner in Whalefall. Photo by Jennifer Clasen. © 2026 20th Century Studios. All rights reserved. Source: the studio’s official film gallery. This is a film publicity still, not a photograph of a real whale encounter.
