Whalefall movie real story: one diver really was swallowed and lived

Whalefall opened in theaters on October 16. Brian Duffield directed it from a script he wrote with Daniel Kraus, adapting Kraus's 2023 novel. Austin Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, a young diver searching the seabed off California for his father's remains, who gets swallowed by a sperm whale and has about an hour of air to get out. Josh Brolin plays his father, Mitt, and Elisabeth Shue plays his mother.

Jay is invented, and so is his whale. The diver who comes closest to his story is real.

What happened to Michael Packard

On June 11, 2021, Michael Packard, a 56-year-old lobster diver from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, was on his second dive of the morning off Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown, near the tip of Cape Cod. He was about 10 feet from the bottom when something hit him.

"The next thing I knew it was completely black," Packard told the Cape Cod Times.

The impact knocked out his regulator. He got it back in his mouth, and only then worked out where he was: inside the mouth of a humpback whale. "I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth," he said. His next thought: "This is it, Michael. This is it. This is how you die."

He was in there for an estimated 30 to 40 seconds. Then the whale surfaced, shook its head and spat him out. Packard went to Cape Cod Hospital with a lot of soft tissue damage and no broken bones.

Swallowed, technically

Packard was in the whale's mouth, not its stomach, and Kraus knows the difference. Humpbacks feed on small fish and krill and can't swallow anything the size of a person.

"When you read about someone being swallowed, generally they're just being mouthed," Kraus said.

Jay's whale is a different animal: a sperm whale, a deep-diving hunter that swallows giant squid whole. In the novel, it's in the middle of attacking one when it takes Jay down with it. Whether a person could actually survive in a sperm whale's stomach is the part nobody has had to find out.

Don't miss: Why does Jay owe money in Netflix's Below? The $80,000 debt explained

What the story borrows from real life

Kraus built the book on a few real encounters and a lot of research:

• the 2020 viral video of two kayakers off California who were briefly engulfed by a lunging humpback and came out unhurt;
• Packard's 2021 encounter, which made headlines around the world;
• research on sperm whales and giant squid, and conversations with specialists in both.

And, of course, Jonah.

What Packard thought of the movie

CNN took him to see Whalefall in 4DX, the format with moving seats and water effects. The scene that got to him was the one where Jay feels the whale around him.

"I could feel the tongue of my whale contracting on me," Packard told CNN.

He said the trailer alone gave him "shiver bumps." In 2021, he was back at work diving for lobster about three weeks after the whale let him go.

Previously we wrote: Where was The Mongoose filmed? Liam Neeson's all-American car chase never touched an American road