Before we see Colin Farrell’s much-anticipated portrayal of Oswald Cobblepot (aka Penguin) in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, the Golden Globe-winning actor will play an 1850s harpooner named Henry Drax in AMC+’s upcoming adaption of Ian McGuire’s novel, The North Water.
Premiering on the AMC+ streaming platform on July 15, this five-part miniseries follows a group of whalers who venture far past the edges of civilization in the Arctic. IGN spoke to writer/director Andrew Haigh (The OA, 45 Years) about Farrell’s Henry Drax, and the steps he took to embody the character.
Be sure to check out our exclusive reveal of the official trailer for The North Water in the video below, or at the top of the page:
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“Drax character especially is a very, very hard one to cast,” Haigh told IGN. “You have to find someone that’s willing to go to some dark places and to physically transform. And Colin was completely up for that physical transformation. Put on a lot of weight, he had a lot of food, he was eating six breakfasts every morning.”
The North Water features an impressive lineup of actors, including Stephen Graham (Boardwalk Empire), Jack O’Connell (Unbroken), Peter Mullan (Ozark), and many more.
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Haigh and his team wanted the series to feel as authentic as possible, so instead of shooting everything in studio with a giant green screen, the cast and crew traveled north of the Svalbard Archipelago “to film sequences in the pack ice, the furthest point north it is believed a drama series has ever filmed before,” according to AMC.
We wanted to know what drove Haigh to film in such harsh conditions. “When I first read the book, I fell in love with the book, and it was so brutal and beautiful,” Haigh explained. “And the environment that the story is set, up in the Arctic Ocean, was so visceral in the novel, and I wanted to try and recreate that somehow. And of course, there’s always talk about doing as much as you can with digital effects and doing it on a stage somewhere. But for me, I was pretty insistent that we got to shoot this on the real location.”
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Haigh also explained that though the story has some similarities to classic stories like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, The North Water is its own animal entirely.
“I think there’s definitely some influences at Moby Dick in there, and there are some influences of some other great whaling dramas and ice-bound adventures,” Haigh said. “But I think it does feel different from all of them somehow. And I love that it was purely fictional. And even in the story, it’s a world that’s fading away, set in the 1850s when the whaling trade was dying out. And so, it felt like a window into a past, and it’s not that far away. And I think one of the most fascinating things to me was when I read that some of these whales can live for up to 200 years. So there’s a world in which a whale that was born in the time of this story could still be sailing around in the seas right now. For some reason, that just blows my mind, that all of these people are long dead, the world has changed so dramatically in the last 150 years, but there could still be some of those same whales around in the Arctic Ocean, which I just think is incredible.”
From See-Saw Films and Rhombus Media, The North Water will be available to stream on AMC+ on Thursday, July 15. The limited series will debut in the UK on BBC Two this fall. What did you think of the trailer? Let us know in the comments.
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David Griffin still watches DuckTales in his pajamas with a cereal bowl in hand. He’s also the TV Editor for IGN. Say hi on Twitter.
