Netflix today dropped first look photos from the upcoming thriller series BELOW from from creator Jesse McKeown (The Umbrella Academy, The Sinner) set in Newfoundland, Canada.
Launching on October 8, the series stars Josh Hartnett (Fight or Flight, Trap), Mackenzie Davis (Speak No Evil, Halt and Catch Fire), Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things, Industry), Ruby Stokes (The Jetty, Lockwood & Co.), Kaleb Horn (Revival, Chucky), Rohan Campbell (Silent Night, Deadly Night, The Monkey), and Willow Kean (The King Tide, Away from Everywhere).
The synopsis reads, “Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett) is a big‑hearted but stubborn fisherman living in a small Newfoundland town, who’s still haunted by his father’s mysterious death from decades ago. When an unidentified sea creature begins terrorizing his hometown, Calvin must fight to hold his close-knit community together. Determined to keep his son Wade (Charlie Heaton) and the rest of his family safe, he teams up with a visiting marine researcher (Mackenzie Davis) to confront the creature and reveal the island’s buried secrets before it’s too late. Blending local myth, thrilling suspense, and heartfelt humor, this twisty six-part limited series dives into themes of family, community, and change – both terrifying and inevitable.”
“I’ve been coming to Newfoundland for many years, and it’s become a part of my life I just always felt like I wanted to set something here, that this would be a great place for something big and something kind of epic. It’s such a unique landscape and such a rugged, dangerous, isolated, scary place in a lot of ways. But then there’s also this other side to it, which is that the community is so warm and the people are so funny and unique and there are so many eccentricities about the place,” creator Jesse McKeown tells Tudum.
On joining the series, Hartnett tells Tudum, “I read the first two scripts in less than an hour. The voice was so clear, the concept was so engaging, and the character was fantastic. I’d never read anything like it before. I had never read anything that was set in Newfoundland before. I didn’t understand the long history of Newfoundland being its own country and having its own dialect and its own very specific ancestry.”
BELOW is written by Karen Walton (Orphan Black, Ginger Snaps), Perry Chafe (Son of a Critch, Saint-Pierre), and Natty Zavitz (Edging, Acquainted). Jamie Childs (The Sandman, His Dark Materials), Helen Shaver (The Penguin, Station Eleven), and Stephen Dunn (Closet Monster, Queer as Folk) directed the episodes.
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