POV: You turned on Below on Netflix without having any idea what it's about, and were greeted with Josh Hartnett doing a Newfoundland accent that you simply didn’t see coming.
There's a lot of debate online about whether or not the accents on this show are “good” (people from the area obviously have a lot of opinions), but one thing is certain: The cast put in a lot of work.
Executive producer Jessica Rhoades explained to Variety that “the hardest thing was finding an accent for the family. You wanted to sync them, as with any region. If you travel a bit, and depending on how long people have been there and what village, you hear the texture and difference in the accent. But for us it was about finding what the Penney family accent would be and how that could be a little different with the kids having gone away. How did we layer that on top of itself? That was the tricky bit, but Josh threw himself in from the day he said yes. He was studying and working.”
Showrunner Jesse McKeown added that Josh “started listening to Newfoundland radio, the call-in shows and talk radio, which are like hugely popular in Newfoundland. There’s this show called 'The Fisheries Broadcast,' which is the longest-running radio show in Canadian history. People just call in and talk about the fishery, and so he just immersed himself in that. He already had it in his head before he set foot on the island.”
Here’s Josh trying to teach the accent to Jimmy Fallon to...mixed results!