By Scott Campbell
Jesse McKeown teased his newest project, Netflix’s Below, as a “creature feature,” but also so much more.
“It’s a thriller in the old-school sense of the word,” McKeown says during a Zoom interview. “This show will deliver thrills in all sorts of different ways.
“It’s a creature feature, but it’s also about a family, and it’s about a community under attack,” he continues. “I think even though this takes place in rural Newfoundland, amongst a bunch of fishermen, people will find something that they can identify with in their own family, when they watch this.”
Below premieres on Netflix on October 8 with the logline, “When a mysterious sea creature terrorizes a small Newfoundland town, a hard-bitten fisherman must fight to protect his family, his community, and his vanishing way of life.”
McKeown, the creator, said he always envisioned the project as a limited series, as there are only six episodes to watch.
“I think that was also part of the appeal,” he says. “It’s that we wanted this to feel like an event. We wanted to tell a complete, full, satisfying story with a beginning, middle, and end.”
With the series set and filmed around Newfoundland and Labrador, McKeown said he married into Newfoundland, as his wife, Marthe Bernard, hails from there.
“Right away, I wanted to shoot something there at some point,” he says. “Preferably something really big and something that felt kind of epic and tapped into those feelings of the history of the place … I never thought I’d really have an opportunity to do that.”
He met with Netflix, made his pitch, and feels filming in Newfoundland was a selling point as well.
“It’s been like a dream come true,” McKeown says. “This is a personal story; it came from me, for better or for worse. It’s not based on a comic book. It’s not a remake of anything, and it’s not based on any IP. And it’s a limited series. And so those are all things that are usually hard to get made. But Netflix was really on board and supportive from the beginning.
“I had a relationship with Netflix going back to The Umbrella Academy for many years, and it just felt like it was in the family,” he recalls. “They were supportive of all the really important stuff. Like, the scale of this, mixing of genres, and the fact that we had to shoot in Newfoundland and really tap into the resources there, like the crew and the actors, and all the things that make Newfoundland.”
After pitching to Netflix, McKeown wrote the pilot, and more scripts were ordered. A very small writer’s room was opened in Toronto and in Newfoundland, and then eventually scouting locations and casting took place.
Production happened over the summer of 2025, but McKeown noted one thing they did ahead of filming was shoot icebergs, which was time-dependent. Some icebergs were found in the Fogo and Twillingate area.
“Like a bunch of icebergs were going by, and so we just reacted quickly,” he recalls. “We put together a small crew, got on a boat, and went out and shot as many of the icebergs as we could.
“And the accent was the other big thing,” he continues. “Obviously, a big percentage of the cast is from Newfoundland, but we had a few people from away, from the States and from the UK. We crammed, and gave them the time and the space that they needed to really work on the accent and have it gel.”
The cast is led by Josh Hartnett as Calvin Penney.
“Josh was the key to everything,” said McKeown. “Once we found our Calvin and he agreed to do it, it was such a thrill because I think he’s a phenomenal actor. I can’t wait for people to see it because he’s so good in the part. And then it was a matter of building a family around him.”
McKeown mentions Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things), Rohan Campbell (The Hardy Boys), Ruby Stokes (Lockwood & Co.), and Willow Kean (SurrealEstate), who round out the Penney family.
“I just feel blessed that we were able to put this cast together,” he says. “They did such tremendous work. We had a little time before we started shooting, so everybody was on the ground in Newfoundland, getting to know each other, working on the accent, and digging into the lifestyle, culture and environment. That really helped solidify them as a family.”
Below premiered the first two episodes during the Toronto International Film Festival. As McKeown was born in Toronto and his first short film premiered at TIFF, it felt like a real homecoming for him.
“It was great to see [Below] on a big screen, with a crowd, a packed house. It was a phenomenal experience.”
Having spearheaded the creation, writing, and seeing through the production, McKeown is nearing the finish line with Below. It doesn’t mean there aren’t still nerves.
“I am all nerves,” he says. “On a good day I’m riddled with anxiety. But things are going as well as I could hope, so I feel good. There’s nothing I can do at this point; I’m just excited for it to go out into the world.”
Below debuts October 8 on Netflix.
Images courtesy of Netflix.
