Whale of a tale: How ‘Whalefall’s’ beast was created with foam, silicone, and water

Several men throwing themselves against a giant rubber stomach might sound like an unusual day on a film set. For production designer Ramsey Avery, it was part of the process of bringing “Whalefall” to life, a film that required an entire team to turn foam, silicone, and water into the interior of a living sperm whale. The challenge was to create a convincing physical environment that could move around an actor while supporting a story about survival, grief, and a son’s complicated relationship with his father.

“If you could ever have stepped outside the stomach and watched what was going on in the filming of it, it really is a remarkable thing,” Avery said in our conversation at the film’s Hollywood premiere. “That stomach was hung off a metal frame, and it was put on a machine that was moving up and down and back and forth. And we actually had to do four different versions of it on different types of machines.”

“But to actually make the stomach come alive, there were seven or eight burly guys pressing on it and pulling on it, and sometimes throwing themselves on it,” Avery explained. Their efforts gave the structure a muscular, shifting quality, helping the audience believe that the whale’s interior was alive.

The filming environment was just as unusual. “So you walk onto this completely dark stage, because the light is all inside the set. It’s not like a normal stage where the light’s lighting the environment. It’s a very dark stage with all these weird noises and this thing moving back and forth and these guys throwing themselves on this rubber thing.”

For Avery, the real achievement was making an unconventional material feel like a living presence. He shared feeling proud about “the fact that we could create from foam and silicone and water, something that feels alive, and that actually has character and that the audience can care about, that it becomes this thing. The stomach has no eyes, and there’s nothing really there to relate to, that you would normally relate to, but in the process of the movie, you come to actually feel something for this whale through its stomach,” he said. “When I read the script, it’s like: I don’t know how we’re gonna do this. But eventually with a lot of great talent, we figured out a way to do that.”

“Whalefall” follows Jay (Austin Abrams), who returns to Monterey, California, a year after his father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), died by suicide. Hoping to find his father’s remains and resolve their troubled relationship, Jay goes diving near Monastery Beach, where a deep underwater canyon presents a formidable hazard. When he encounters a giant squid fleeing a sperm whale, a freak accident leaves him trapped inside the animal with roughly an hour of oxygen remaining. His fight to escape forces him to confront the complicated feelings he carries about his father.

Avery’s challenge extended beyond the stomach. The production built several interior sets at CBS Radford Studios, including different stomach configurations, an esophagus, and a larynx. These allowed the filmmakers to capture Jay’s journey from multiple angles while maintaining the cramped, disorienting atmosphere of the whale’s body.

The underwater sequences required an equally ambitious construction effort. Special effects supervisor Mark Hawker, whose credits include “Stranger Things,” and his team built a custom tank measuring 45 feet in diameter and 16 feet deep. It held 175,000 gallons of water, weighed more than 60 tons and took about a month to construct. The tank provided the setting for sequences involving the sperm whale, the giant squid, and the underwater canyon where Jay’s ordeal begins. 

Abrams prepared for the film’s physical demands by learning to scuba dive and building his endurance. He even walked around his neighborhood wearing full scuba gear, adding weight and resistance to his daily routine before the demanding underwater shoots. The film’s crew praised his dedication, describing Abrams as consistently enthusiastic about new challenges, even when the work left him exhausted.

The filmmakers shot Jay’s journey through the whale in sequence, allowing Abrams to experience the character’s physical and emotional progression together. As Jay moved through the animal, his struggle to survive became inseparable from his efforts to understand his father. “For me, it was really helpful to understand where I was emotionally day to day in the story because otherwise, especially in that environment, it would have been extremely difficult and confusing to shoot it out of sequence,” Abrams said.

The shoot depended on close coordination between Abrams, the crew manipulating the stomach and the lighting team, whose cues had to match the actor’s movements between sets. “It was a completely collaborative experience,” Abrams said in another interview. “So what you’re seeing is the culmination of a lot of people coming together and bringing their A-game to make cinema magic.”

That collaborative spirit is central to Avery’s approach to production design. His work spans “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” for which he received an Art Directors Guild Award, the independent drama “Waitress,” and the Avengers Campus attraction at Disney California Adventure. Moving between intimate stories and expansive fictional worlds, he looks for projects that can connect with audiences in unexpected ways.

In our interview, Avery recalled his affection for “Waitress,” the Keri Russell film that begins as a comedy and gradually reveals a deeper emotional force. He sees a similar opportunity in “Whalefall,” where an extraordinary survival story becomes a means of exploring grief and reconciliation. “I want to make projects that allow people to feel something,” he said in our conversation. “Not force them to feel something, but allow them into the world and feel joy or laughter or sorrow, something that lets them kind of get out of their own bodies for a little bit.”

In “Whalefall,” that emotional ambition was realized inside a whale’s stomach, built from practical materials and brought to life by the coordinated efforts of an entire crew. Avery and his team faced an environment with few visual precedents and found a way to make it feel tangible, responsive, and compelling. The result gives Jay’s desperate fight for survival a physical setting that also reflects the difficult journey through his memories of his father.