Men's Health October 19, 2026 0 Comments

Surviving Whalefall: The Untold Human Challenge That Tests Mind, Body, and Survival Instincts to the Limit!

Imagine getting swallowed whole by a sperm whale—not some mythical tale, but a real-life gasp-worthy event that’s happened more than a few times recently. In Daniel Kraus’s novel Whalefall, a teenage scuba diver is literally gulped down while chasing a giant squid, a premise so wild it echoes the biblical Jonah story. Yet, with kayakers and lobster fishermen reportedly surviving similar colossal engulfs, it begs the question: could such an unbelievable ordeal actually happen? As the new Whalefall film adapts this gripping story, we dive deep—quite literally—into what life inside a whale’s stomach might really look like. Ever wonder what’s beyond that massive mouth, or if surviving the adventure is more than just Hollywood magic? Let’s unpack the truth about whales, survival, and the surprisingly intricate anatomy that makes this cinematic escape all too plausible. LEARN MORE

9 min read

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.

A diver interacting with a gigantic underwater creature in a deep blue ocean setting.

20th Century Studios

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.

A person in scuba gear submerged in dark, turbulent water surrounded by rocky cave walls.

20th Century Studios

For the main stomach, we started off with a very simple mockup. We got a bunch of upholstery foam, roughed out the size of what we wanted to do, hung it on a rig, and started to put people inside of it to see how it moved. Is it big enough? What’s the shape like? How do we get a camera inside?

A whale’s stomach has two entrances and exits. For the first stomach, there’s an entrance from the esophagus and an exit into the second stomach, and those entrances and exits are called sphincters. I have to say, I’ve used the word “sphincter” more in the last year than I ever imagined I would over the course of my entire life. But the first thing we figured out is that our sphincters could not sit right behind the actor’s head, because you didn’t really want the audience looking at the equivalent of a butthole for the entire movie. So we had to figure out how to adjust the anatomy of the stomach, both for the visual of it because we want our audience to be able to go along for the ride, but also to determine the action because when you read the script, it reads like the stomach is a long tunnel with an entrance at the front and the exit at the back. But in a real sperm whale stomach, both of those sphincters are up near the top of the stomach. We ended up going with that because it’s better for the action, better for the visuals, and more real.

But to get all of that to work, we had multiple things that the stomachs had to do, and we had multiple ways we needed to get cameras in there. Sometimes we had to put two or even three cameras in this little tiny space, so we did a whole test process again, carrying on with our mockups. Every time we did a mockup, we did a camera test, and we developed it further and further and further and got more specific with the shape language.

MH: Were all the sets four-walled enclosures?

RA: Yeah, they were 360 degree sets, holding water inside, and you could climb in and out of the sphincters. Those could function as camera ports, too, but we made other camera ports as well to be able to get some shots from different angles. With all the folds inside a whale stomach, you can hide those ports relatively simply, too.

MH: Did the movie already have science experts on staff when you came on or did you have to track down your own?

RA: Because the movie is based on Daniel Kraus’s book, he’d already done a lot of that work to make sure everything felt real. So he put us in contact with his experts and then we reached out a little further to other sources. For example, we found a person who was an expert in whale sound to ask what type of sounds a whale would or could make.

We know that the inside of that first stomach is filled with methane and unbreathable gasses, because there have been times—and Dr. Joy actually had this happen to her—when a researcher cuts into a whale’s stomach and it’ll explode because of all the gasses building up inside. So, we know that you couldn’t really breathe for any period of time inside that stomach and that’s a key element to our story, because it sets a timer. Jay only has X number of minutes of oxygen in his tank—and that’s a real thing.

MH: Where did you end up having to stretch the truth?

RA: The whale does a lot of things, and we don’t really know whether or not that’s how a whale would react with something like that in his stomach that he can’t seem to swallow. We can make guesses, but we don’t know, because that’s not something that can be studied.

The fact is that if you’re studying a whale, odds are it’s dead or it’s on the verge of dying, because that’s the only way you can do the work. You can’t see a whale’s insides while it’s still living in the ocean. There’s a lot we can’t know.

A diver holding a glowing jellyfish in an underwater setting.

20th Century Studios

MH: It’s incredible how much we still don’t know about oceanic creatures. Like, we still don’t know where Great White sharks are born.

RA: It’s funny because we’re learning more and more and more now, though, and even in the time that we were doing this project we got the first real imagery of a giant squid.

That’s another thing: By the time a giant squid gets to the surface—which happens very rarely—they’re dead and they’ve deflated. How they function is a mystery to us. But just in the last year or so, footage of a whale eating a giant squid came out, so we’re still learning things.

MH: Speaking of giant squid: How did you decide what else to put in your stomachs? What would be inside a hungry whale?

RA: Because of the autopsies that have been done on whales, we know the types of things that are in their stomachs. That second stomach where the digestion happens is where squid beaks get left behind because the acid in there isn’t enough to digest them. That’s also where ambergris comes from: The leftover parts and bits of squid that aren’t completely digested and that get kind of fused into this weird material.

The water itself was a special effects issue. We had to figure out the right viscosity and the right opacity of the water to make it feel like it would be inside a stomach. Wētā Workshop created a bunch of bits and pieces and flotsam and jetsam, like they built all of the beaks and then did multiples in various levels of digestion. They built the squid as well, which was a practical effect. We did this sequence with Jay fighting the squid that you see in the trailer, and that’s all practical props we then augmented and extended with visual effects.

MH: Having done all this work, how confident are you that, if you got sucked down by a sperm whale today, you could survive? Have you put yourself in the shoes of your lead?

RA: There are a gazillion pictures of me in various components of the stomach, the mouth, and the esophagus, because I didn’t want to ask Austin [Abrams] or the stunt doubles to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself. There are even pictures of me crawling in the mouth of the whale in my wetsuit in the tank. In terms of actually surviving inside a whale, though, one of the things we were able to sort out is that Austin [Abrams] is a relatively slight person, so he might fit in with his tanks better than I would fit in with my tanks. I’m not sure I would actually go down the throat, because I’m a bigger guy. But at least I’ve also learned the methodologies that he learned to try and get out.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Marah Eakin is a Los Angeles–based freelance reporter who’s been writing about pop culture and lifestyle since 2010. She spent 12 years at The A.V. Club and has contributed to Wired, Vulture, Dwell, The Strategist, Thrillist, The Ringer, Fodor’s, IndieWire, and a number of other publications.