Interview: Rohan Campbell on ‘Below’
There is something immediately likeable about Rohan Campbell’s Jay Penney in Below. He arrives back in Snook’s Arm for Come Home Year to the kind of welcome reserved for someone who has genuinely been missed, all smiles, jokes and easy familiarity with seemingly everyone in town. It doesn’t take long to realise that the successful life he appears to have built for himself away from home is not quite what it seems.
Jay is Calvin Penney’s (Josh Hartnett) youngest son, returning to Newfoundland after leaving Snook’s Arm while his older brother Wade (Charlie Heaton) stayed behind and his sister Mary (Ruby Stokes) built a life of her own in Montreal. Jay comes home looking like the one who has things figured out. A threatening message on his phone very quickly tells us otherwise.
Created by Jesse McKeown, Below follows the Penney family and the residents of Snook’s Arm as their already struggling fishing community finds itself dealing with something much stranger than declining catches and the possibility of being bought out of their homes: a mysterious creature lurking in the water. Mackenzie Davis stars alongside Hartnett as marine biologist Fonda Howander, while Natasha Henstridge, Mary Walsh, Joshua Close and Willow Kean round out the ensemble.
There is horror here, certainly, and some impressively large creature set pieces, but Below is considerably lighter on its feet than the premise might suggest. It’s funny, strange and very affectionate towards the people of Newfoundland, as interested in watching this family bicker, drink and stumble through their various personal disasters as it is in whatever may be waiting beneath the surface.
For Campbell, the show came along at a particularly interesting moment. After spending three seasons as Frank Hardy in The Hardy Boys, his work over the last few years has moved increasingly into genre, from Corey Cunningham in David Gordon Green’s divisive Halloween Ends to Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey and his lead role as Billy Chapman in Mike P. Nelson’s Silent Night, Deadly Night. Below, however, offered something a little closer to home.
“I grew up with British parents in a very small town in Canada, and I wasn’t really Canadian, and I definitely wasn’t British,” he reflects. “This show is so inherently Canadian, and I think it came at a time in my life where I was trying to figure out what that meant. The thing that drew me into the project was being able to express that and explore that, and figure out what it means to me to be Canadian.”
“To have it on a scale this size, to be distributed to the world this way with Netflix on this scale, and make a show this big about Canada, that hasn’t happened yet. That’s never happened. It all just felt incredibly special, and on top of that, it’s like you sort of have this Fargo–Jaws TV show. I just think it was like everything was a home run for me. It was such a no-brainer. I was so excited to be a part of it in any way.”
Campbell understood Jay almost immediately.
“The thing about Jay is, I grew up with 100 Jays,” he says. “They’re just salt of the earth, blue collar, life of the party, sweetheart guys that are just always on the go. They’ve always got a plan, they’ve always got a business deal, and they’ve always got something going on.”
“Because I grew up with these guys, I was so instantly like, I know this person. He’s such a brother to family. The way he enters the show is sort of like this Mary Poppins of Newfoundland floating into the show, not to give any spoilers away. But the way we meet him, how happy everyone is to see him, all that stuff, that is who these people are, and that is the energy they bring to the room.”
“Mary Poppins of Newfoundland” is actually a pretty perfect description of how Campbell first plays him. Jay breezes back into town with the confidence of someone convinced he can talk his way out of almost anything. The problem is that he has arrived with a mess considerably larger than he lets on.
And while everyone else is becoming increasingly concerned about what is happening in the water, Jay spends a surprisingly large amount of the series trying to deal with a completely different emergency.
“My favourite thing about Jay in the show and playing him is, there’s this imminent threat to town, but Jay’s got this imminent threat to him,” Campbell laughs. “As much chaos is going on in town, he’s like, yeah, great, can’t deal with that right now, I got to fix my shit.”
“It’s just such a fun audience perspective to be with Jay for parts of this show, on his own little mission to fix things with duct tape and spit at this point, and to watch him reel and think on his toes when he’s not really equipped to. It just cracks me up. It’s such good writing from Jesse.”
That split is a big part of why Jay works so well. He is living in a creature feature where everyone else is trying to figure out what is attacking the town, while he spends a decent amount of his time desperately trying to stop his own very human problems from catching up with him.
Eventually, of course, the two collide.
One of Jay’s biggest sequences comes later in the series when he finds himself in a car with two men who have arrived to collect what he owes them, only for the creature to make their disagreement considerably less important. Campbell remembers the scale of putting the sequence together as much as the scene itself.
“The entire sequence was shot in three different locations. There was a pool, there was an actual ocean, there was all this stuff. Taping the whole thing together took like 100 people. It’s a massive, massive piece to complete. And so to shoot that in all those places, and to have that much time to do it, was amazing,” he says.
Campbell remembers shooting a beat that ultimately didn’t make the final cut, in which Jay is being threatened by the very people who have travelled to Newfoundland to collect from him and somehow still finds himself offering them somewhere to sleep.
“This is what I mean. This is what it is to be from Newfoundland. They just can’t help but be kind,” he says. “Even if they are so mad at you, if they’re in so much danger, there’s a joke that we shot on the day that I think was taken out of the show just for some editorial reasons.”
“But there’s a joke when Jay’s getting beat down by these people coming to collect, and he offers them a place to stay. It’s so informative of what it is to be from Newfoundland. It’s just so funny. He just can’t help but include people, even if they’re there for something that’s malicious or whatever else.”
That warmth extends well beyond Jay.
Much of Below depends on believing the Penneys have known one another their entire lives, and Campbell credits the time the cast spent together in Newfoundland with making that dynamic considerably easier to find. Their first challenge was learning one of the most notoriously specific accents in Canada.
“Hats off to Josh and production, they put us together as fast as possible,” he says. “Learning that accent together is such a humiliation ritual, starting from scratch and trying to learn that very specific, difficult accent. I think we all really bonded through that experience.”
“The reason this show is such a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I’ll never forget it. I think it’s probably the best shoot I’ve ever had in my whole life. We were always with each other. We would finish work and go down to the pub and, you know, a lot of the crew was British, and there was a different culture to the set where we were always with each other all the time.”
For Campbell, that closeness mattered because the Penneys needed to feel like a family before the show ever asked the audience to care what happened to them.
“If you’re going to meet them immediately, you need to feel the dynamic. You don’t need to hear it, you need to know, and you need to feel it. It needs to feel warm,” he says.
“The thing that I’m most proud of about this show is, a lot of things can feel quite cold right now, or sad or dark or whatever it is, and the show is just beaming with heart. There’s so much heart. That’s something that I think is rare, and I think we should cherish it.”
The creature is important, but so is the pleasure of spending six episodes with a slightly odd group of people who clearly love one another.
Campbell nearly loved Newfoundland enough to stay.
“I almost moved,” he laughs. “I was ready to live in Newfoundland.”
It helped that the production rarely tried to fake where it was.
The series was shot extensively on location, including its larger sequences on the water, and Campbell believes the unpredictability of working in that environment is visible in the finished show.
“I just don’t think you can fake Newfoundland. I don’t think it’s possible. I don’t even think being in a studio would have made sense,” he says.
“All the boat sequences, everything, the big set pieces, we’re on boats and there’s three other boats with cameras and cranes around us, and we’re figuring out how to drive two boats next to each other. So everything feels dynamic, everything feels alive, because there’s an adrenaline to it.”
For Campbell, the landscape and the people also made more sense together.
“Newfoundland is such a wild place, which is why the people are so warm,” he says. “I think if you don’t have the wildness, you don’t get the warmth. Those two things coexisting together is what sort of gives this really refreshing new palette.”
Playing Jay also connected with something Campbell has been thinking about more as he gets older: his own sense of identity.
“As I’ve gotten older, I had an identity crisis at 25 where I was like, growing up with British parents, I wasn’t British enough, and I wasn’t Canadian enough,” he says. “At 25, 26, I sort of sat down and was like, okay, I can finally stop sprinting because I have a career, and I’m proud of the work, and I’m going to be okay.”
“When you read a script, you sort of go, where do I fit in this? What can I find out about myself? How do I not need to worry about my own identity?”
It is a change from how he approached the job when he was younger.
“Back when I was younger, it was just about showing up and trying my hardest to do a really good job, to prove it to myself, or to say I can do it,” he says. “Now it’s become this thing of, I’m addicted to exploring an identity that’s not my own, because I’m not entirely sure I know who I am in any way. I think that really lends itself to the job.”
Looking across Campbell’s recent filmography, there isn’t much of an obvious straight line. Corey Cunningham in Halloween Ends, a role in Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, Billy Chapman in Silent Night, Deadly Night, a memorable appearance caught between Sabrina Carpenter and Jenna Ortega in the gloriously violent music video for “Taste,” and now Jay Penney are not exactly variations on the same character.
“It takes a lot to leave your home, leave your family, get up at three in the morning, drive an hour to shoot something for 12 hours a day. Making a film is so impossibly difficult,” Campbell says, quickly clarifying that he knows what a privilege the job is.
“What I mean is, I just choose things that I feel like could only be cultivated by someone crazy enough that they need to make it. That to me is the most addicting feeling in the world. I want to make things that would not exist without one crazy person running it up the flagpole.”
Campbell traces a lot of that thinking back to Halloween Ends.
David Gordon Green’s conclusion to his Halloween trilogy remains one of the strangest swings ever taken by a major slasher franchise, largely shifting Michael Myers to the side in favour of Campbell’s Corey Cunningham and asking audiences to follow a new character through the final chapter of a story they thought they already knew.
Campbell still talks about the film with an obvious amount of affection.
“I circle back to Halloween Ends. I think that’s such a brave movie for David Gordon Green,” he says. “I think it’s such a power move for him to be like, this is where my heart’s at, and I want to make this movie. I want to see this movie. It’s personal to him in a very cool way.”
“I think he delivered something that tonally is really special, and over the years it’s grown, and turned into this thing that sort of keeps living onward.” It’s something he’s carried with him ever since. “Every other project I’ve chosen from that point with that sort of leadership in my ear and that bravery, I just can’t bring myself to fake interest in things,” he says. “I need people to be as crazy as me about an idea in order to feel the energy to go do it.”
Corey also remains the role he is proudest of. “I’m just so proud of that movie. I worked so hard to just feel that movie, if that makes sense,” he says. “I knew I was never going to get an experience, I’m such a big horror film fan. So to have that experience, to wrestle with Michael Myers, to work with one of my childhood heroes, David Gordon Green, and to be around Jamie, and to have that experience, I knew I was never going to get a chance to do that again.”
“Or at least in that moment, I was thinking, look, if this never happens again, you need to be present here, and you need to be present as Corey.” The memories remain unusually physical for him. “It’s so viscerally in my body. I feel every day that we went to work and made that movie. I know what it smelled like. I know what it felt like. I know how I was feeling.”
“It’s like it’s captured in a bottle for me, and it’s such a private experience,” he continues. “Handing that movie off was like, a lot of people were like, is this scary, are you worried about the fan base and whatever else, and it almost felt so personal to me that I forgot it was going to be handed off to a fan base.”
“I’ll be very excited to watch that maybe 10, 15 years with a crowd, and see who shows up, and discuss that film then. I think it’ll be a really special thing.”
Campbell will next move from Newfoundland to an entirely different kind of story with Ron Howard’s Alone at Dawn. He has a role opposite Adam Driver and Anne Hathaway in the true story of Air Force Combat Controller John A. Chapman, who was killed during the Battle of Takur Ghar in Afghanistan and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The film is currently scheduled to begin its theatrical rollout on Christmas Day 2027. “Another once-in-a-lifetime experience, Ron Howard. Lifelong hero, massive fan, even better human, just amazing,” Campbell says.
“The movie is about an American war hero, John Chapman, who was killed in action in Afghanistan. He saved the lives of a ton of Americans that night. It’s just a remarkable true story, an unbelievable true story. I think only someone like Ron Howard can really shepherd that in the right way.” Working alongside Driver was another education entirely.
“To be around someone like Adam and see his focus and work dedication, and the dedication to tell that man’s story, to be that close to it was a pretty surreal experience,” Campbell says. “Unbelievable, really.”
Campbell is also hoping his next few years will take him behind the camera. He is currently developing his first feature as a director, with plans, if everything falls into place, to shoot in summer 2027.
“I’ve got a couple of things on the go right now. I’m trying to direct my own movie in the summer of next year, which I’m really excited about,” he says. “It’s a cute idea, so we’re sort of just trying to get all systems to go on that one. It’s a big part of my focus, and it’s a very personal story.”
And beyond that?
“I don’t know. I’d love to stay employed. That’s the baseline,” he laughs. “I’d like to just keep going and keep working with people that really inspire me, and see where I end up. That’s the focus.”
Below is now streaming on Netflix.