Josh Hartnett Reveals He Was “Actively Not Looking to Do a TV Show” Before Joining ‘Below’

Josh Hartnett was happy to continue his career on the big screen before Below came his way. 

The Oppenheimer actor revealed on Friday that was “actively not looking” for television roles before reading the script of the Netflix thriller miniseries, created and written by Jesse McKeown.  

“Can I just say I was actively not looking to do a TV show?” Harnett shared at The Hollywood Reporter’s Studio at 1 Hotel during Toronto International Film Festival, presented by sponsor Canada Goose. “Like, I was actively not looking for this. I’d just came off a movie and wanted to do another movie. I was going to go do another movie, and then I read this [script], and I was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’”

Set in a remote Newfoundland fishing village, Below follows Hartnett’s Calvin as he fights to protect his family and community from a mysterious, terrifying sea creature. The series, which also stars Charlie Heaton, Mackenzie Davis and Natasha Henstridge, has been compared to Apple TV’s comedy horror hit Widow’s Bay, but Hartnett sees a distinct difference between the two shows.  

“ I saw Widow’s Bay and I really liked it, but there’s a totally different tone in this show,” he explained. “It’s much more sort of human-oriented and less sort of overtly comedic, but very funny in its own way.”  

Below was filmed on location in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, where Hartnett learned the unique Canadian accent and lived like a local. The Verity actor told THR that he often frequented restaurants in town (“I love The Duke. It’s a great pub”) and did his best “not to hit [a] moose” while driving. Hartnett and Heaton worked with a dialect coach to perfect the Newfoundland accent. 

“ Charlie and I play father and son, and we are clearly from the same place. We had to find the specific sounds that we were gonna use for our family accent,” the actor said. “Newfoundland is not — there’s not a lot of people, but it’s a very large land mass, and there are lots of people that have been there for generations in one place. [They have] very specific dialects, and there’s many of them. We had to choose which one was gonna work best, I think, for the family, and then all work together … We were able to do that, which was really cool, and we had a great dialect coach.” 

Hartnett added that he listened to The Broadcast, a long-running radio show on CBC, “almost every day” to master the accent “because [there] was so many regional dialects.”

While his character in Below may be fearless in the water, Harnett has a decidingly different view. 

“I was born in 1978, like [when] Jaws [was popular],” the actor dished. “[I’m] terrified of the water.” 

Below debuts on Netflix on Oct. 8.