Woody Harrelson rarely says yes to a role without first reading a script.
But when he was approached to star in Last Breath, a deep-sea survival thriller now playing in theatres, he jumped in feet first. Harrelson was well aware of the real-life account of a trio of divers who found themselves in a life-and-death situation when one of them became stranded at the bottom of the North Sea, off the coast of Scotland, in 2012.
After producer Paul Brooks, with whom he worked on the 2023 dramedy Champions, encouraged him to watch a documentary that recounted their harrowing, edge-of-your-seat ordeal, Harrelson was immediately hooked by the idea of suiting up to help tell a dramatic reimagining of the tale.
“I watched (the doc) and then next day I said I’m in,” Harrelson says in a video interview from New York City. “This is phenomenal. It’s a nail-biter, too.”
Last Breath is a dramatized adaptation of the 2019 documentary of the same name directed by Alex Parkinson and Richard da Costa and centres on Chris Lemons (Finn Cole), a diver who became stranded while repairing an undersea pipe at the bottom of the ocean. With only five minutes of oxygen and no chance of rescue for at least half-an-hour, his colleagues Duncan Allcock (Harrelson) and Dave Yuasa (Simu Liu) and a team on the surface work furiously to try and mount a rescue.
As they work to try and save Lemons, the story blends high-stakes drama, alongside themes of human will, no-quit determination and unfailing team effort. Like Thirteen Lives, which dramatized the 2018 rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a flooded cave, Last Breath is an account that comes ready-built for the big screen.
“This is the story I’ve lived with for 10 years now, and I know it inside out,” says Parkinson, who returns to direct the fictionalized re-enactment. “I aimed to do more than just remake the documentary. I wanted to tell this remarkable story on the grandest scale possible, and explore new dimensions of the characters’ emotional journeys.”
Having watched the documentary and shown it to family and friends, Cole (PeakyBlinders, AnimalKingdom) was familiar with Lemons’ nightmare of becoming stranded on the seafloor. But when he read the script penned by Parkinson, David Brooks and Mitchell LaFortune, he found it to be just as “fast-paced and exciting as the doc.”
After leading Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Liu says he embraced the opportunity to explore a world that he was totally unfamiliar with.
“They told me, ‘If you do this, you’re going to be diving every day and you’re going to be underwater. They’re not going to fake anything. You’re going to do the damn thing,’” Liu says. “In a world where we’ve basically dreamt up every way to fake everything onscreen nowadays, there’s something to be said for a movie (to be real). We weren’t a 100 metres below sea level, but we shot in a tank and went to work every day and put on our suits and went underwater.”
Harrelson says having Parkinson come back to direct the feature film added to the verisimilitude of the trio’s clock-ticking experience.
“It’s cool that we got Alex Parkinson to do this as well. He knew exactly what he was doing and he made it really exciting,” Harrelson says.
Over 95-minutes, viewers will be glued to their seats, but afterwards some people might be left with questions about divine intervention after seeing the heart-pounding resolution to the threesome’s unimaginable situation.
“We all had different mindsets going into it, but I mean it’s wild to think of,” Cole says. “They didn’t have time to think about that in the moment.”
Liu thinks for Yuasa it was just another day at the office and he was unmoved by the rising stakes. “I don’t know if Dave’s reflected too much,” he says. “He just keeps moving forward.”
“But there is a spiritual element to it in the midst of an action film,” Harrelson says. “It’s not a genuine action film, but everything about it is like an action film. But you do have this real spiritual element.”
Last Breath is now playing in theatres