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IN DANIEL KRAUS’S novel Whalefall, a teenage scuba diver is swallowed alive by a sperm whale in pursuit of a giant squid. While that might seem like a farfetched tale, reminiscent of Jonah being swallowed up by a whale in the bible, it actually happens more than you think. In 2025, a kayaker was sucked up by a whale near Chile and in 2021, a lobster fisherman was swallowed while diving to check his traps near Provincetown, Mass. Both survived, having been rather quickly spit back up by their respective seabound captors, but it begs the important question: Is Whalefall’s premise more of a cautionary tale than it is a total fantasy?
That’s certainly one of the questions the creators of Whalefall’s new cinematic adaptation want viewers to ask themselves. Starring the very busy Austin Abrams (who last month appeared in Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil) as poor Jay Gardiner, the diver who ends up in the whale, the film bounces back and forth narratively from the cetacean’s stomach to life with Gardiner’s recently deceased father (Josh Brolin), whose remains Jay was seeking when he was swallowed up.
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It’s a complicated story that asks more than just “how will this dude get out of this whale,” and yet, the story and struggle behind Gardiner’s eventual (spoiler alert!) escape is captivating. Could someone really survive being sucked into a whale’s guts and not just their mouths? And what’s actually inside a whale, if not just a big empty cavern and a couple of rowboats, a la movies like Pinocchio?
Ramsey Avery, Whalefall’s Production Designer, has put a whole lot of thought into both questions, mulling over everything from how to accurately depict what a whale’s stomach lining would look like to the mechanics of a whale’s multiple stomach sphincters. (And there are multiples!) Men’s Health talked to him about the practical challenges of building camera-ready whale guts, the realities of life inside a constantly diving sperm whale, and whether he thinks he’s ready to fight his way out of one should a future swim go sideways.
MEN’S HEALTH: Where did your brain go when you first heard you got the Whalefall gig?
RAMSEY AVERY: We dove immediately into a lot of research, and the thing you discover fairly quickly is no one has really stuck a camera down the mouth of a sperm whale to see what that all looks like inside there. We have plenty of photography of porpoises and orcas and dolphins, which gives us something we can compare to, though, and then we reached out to a couple of cetacean experts.
Dr. Joy Reidenberg was our key contact and we just started asking a bunch of questions about size and shape and what happens in each of the stomachs. There are four stomachs in a whale and each has a different function. There are some interesting things about sperm whale anatomy, too, as opposed to say a blue whale or a humpback whale, which make it possible that a human could actually get swallowed and then survive the experience for at least a bit.
Another interesting thing is that sperm whales don't chew. They have teeth, but mostly they're like antlers on an elk. They're for display and dominance battles. Sperm whales kind of suck their food in instead. They create this compression chamber with their tongue that draws squid in.
Also, because sperm whales have evolved to eat giant squid unlike pretty much every other mammal, their larynx has been shifted off to the side rather than in the center so that there’s room for the big squid to go through. That's why, if you look at a sperm whale, its blowhole is on the left side of the head rather than centered like all the other whales and dolphins.
From the autopsies and dissections that Dr. Joy and others have done, we figured out the basic size, shape, and colors of a whale stomach. That meant I looked at a lot of really interesting dissection videos and photography first thing in the morning quite often. That was really how we tried to dive in, because for the director, for the studio, and for the producers, it was really critical that it be believable.
MH: It sounds like you’d have to do a lot of reverse math, like “If we need to fit a six-foot actor inside this stomach, proportionally we’d need a whale that’s this big”?
RA: You are exactly right. For whatever reason, most of the whales that wash up on coasts are either female or juvenile, but we do have a lot of records from whaling days about the sizes of male whales. We were able to take a look at the dimensions of those whales’s internal organs and mouths and project them out. And as it turns out, if you wanted to be able to put a person in a stomach that was about six feet tall and about eight feet long—which was the smallest we felt we could do and actually be able to get a camera inside there with the actor—that meant that the whale had to be about 80 feet long... which is right about the length of the largest sperm whales on record. So, it makes sense!
MH: How many models did you make, and how did you represent the differences between stomachs?
RA: The first stomach, where most of the movie takes place, is where a sperm whale chews its food. There's no digestion going on in there. Because they don't have teeth, their stomach actually does the chewing, so it's a muscular compressive stomach.
We do get into another stomach, which is where digestion starts. That's when you start getting into the acids. For the movie, we had to create part of the outside of a whale and its mouth, which we could put in a tank with water so that we could have both our hero actor and his stunt doubles be able to perform appropriately against a real set piece. We started there and then we looked at how the back of the throat and the esophagus works, how that all connects back in, and what the shape language of that is. We ended up creating a couple of set pieces for that to make it all work.
