For Josh Brolin, the whale in Whalefall leads to a story about a son coming to terms with a troubled father-son relationship. The character genuinely faces a fight to survive, but that ordeal serves a larger purpose. Brolin told Polygon, “Whales are a symbol in this movie, to get you to a place where you get out of your own way.”
Scuba diver Jay Gardiner, portrayed by Austin Abrams, heads into the Pacific Ocean to recover his father’s remains in Whalefall, which is now in theaters. His father is played by Brolin. The search goes wrong when a huge sperm whale swallows Jay, who has just an hour’s supply of oxygen left to escape.
The confined space and ticking clock drive the suspense, and the film aims to put you inside the physical ordeal of being swallowed. Underneath, though, Jay is working out his relationship with his dad, and that story goes well beyond whale anatomy.
A week ahead of the movie’s release, Polygon interviewed Brolin, Abrams, director Brian Duffield and novelist and screenwriter Daniel Kraus at New York Comic Con 2026. Alongside writing the novel, Kraus, also the author of Angel Down, adapted it with Duffield. The director’s credits include No One Will Save You and Cocaine Bear.
The animal isn’t the enemy in this survival story
Kraus and Duffield never saw the whale as a villain, even with Jay trapped inside it. Researching sperm whales left Kraus awestruck rather than frightened, thanks to their strange nature, their intelligence and reports of them helping people in distress.
“The whale was never a being of fear or intimidation. It was always a figure of awe and majesty. As soon as you start researching whales, particularly sperm whales, they are the most bizarre, magical, mystical, strange beings that I almost saw as gods, being angelic and so intelligent. There are so many reports of them helping people in distress. They’re just these incredible creatures, so it’s more of a sense of, ‘this thing is so big that it doesn’t even know we exist’ in the way that God may just not even notice the ants of humanity.”
Duffield feels the same way, seeing the whale as an innocent creature rather than a monster hunting prey.
“Everyone involved loves whales. We approached it with a lot of love and respect. It’s the most innocent character in the movie. It’s just living its life and I think, by the end of the movie, you really view it as a hero of some sorts.”
A stomach set built to roll, squeeze and hold water
Building the inside of the whale was a different challenge. Kraus said the hardest part was the first stomach. A sperm whale’s stomach has four chambers, and the first couldn’t just be a motionless room around the actor.
For the book, Kraus worked with whale scientists, biologists and diving experts and studied photographs and dissected parts to picture Jay’s surroundings. A movie can’t leave the details to the reader’s imagination, so production designer Ramsey Avery had to build a moving space that held liquid and looked alive.
Speaking to Polygon, Kraus described what changed between the two versions:
“In the book, everything was equally difficult because I’m not a whale scientist. I was learning from the whale scientists and biologists and diving experts and trying to visualize it, looking at pictures and dissected parts, trying to figure this out. As difficult as that was, it’s much more difficult in the movie. I can obscure things in the writing, but in the movie, you have to build it and it all has to be there. That’s where Ramsey Avery came in, the production designer. As much as I thought I knew about whales, pretty soon he had overtaken me with all these incredible visual studies of what things really look like. The biggest challenge was the main stomach – stomach number one – because it has to do everything. It has to chew, it has to roll over, it has to incline, it has to be filled with liquid and water and animals and jellyfish and squid. As a set, it’s a huge problem. How do you build something that can do all that? And it’s living and it’s soft and it has bioluminescent lighting. It’s so much to ask of a set.”
The same sequence proved the most difficult for Abrams, who called the challenge “the compression, being squeezed.” Playing Jay meant more than acting within an elaborate version of the first stomach: the space also needed to press inward around him.
