Move over H20: Just Add Water, there’s a new Australian-made aquatic show hitting screens. Only this one has fewer mermaids… and by fewer we mean none. It’s called Dive Club.
WATCH: Dive Club Trailer
Dive Club centres around a group of teenagers… not to mention skilled divers (skilled divers at 16 years old?? It’s the talent for us 😩). Their names are Maddie, Lauren, Anna, Stevie and Izzie.
But their idyllic existence is suddenly shattered when their town of Cape Mercy is rocked by a cyclone, leaving Lauren missing. As the group search to find their friend, they uncover shocking secrets about the place they call home.
Ahead of the show’s premiere on Aussie Netflix on November 29th, Girlfriend caught up with Alex Grant, 24, who plays the part of Hayden on the show, whom he tells us is the “bad boy” of Cape Mercy.
“When we first meet him, he’s just gotten back from juvenile detention for stealing and crashing a boat and he’s returned with a vengeance to change his ways and seek out, I guess, acceptance from all the other teams on the island and make up with his girlfriend Stevie and just heal the relationships that he’s damaged in the past.”
Filmed in the picturesque Far North Queensland, Alex says the experience was “humid but beautiful” while also pointing out that the COVID pandemic made shooting a little unorthodox.
“We all did two weeks in hotel quarantine prior to shooting because we weren’t based in Queensland and that came with many tests, which is good fun,” he jokes, before stressing that during filming they were in a “COVID bubble”.
“I probably reckon we went through about a good dozen and a half COVID tests throughout the entire shoot block, so we had plenty of practice.”
And COVID tests weren’t the only way the cast had to prepare for the show, with Alex revealing that the girls had to endure some rigorous training leading up to their underwater scenes.
“I know the girls did go through about a week and a half to two weeks of dive training where they did various diving exercises and going to like twenty metres and thirty metres and ridiculous things that I couldn’t imagine doing.”
Although there was no diving training on Alex’s plate, he was faced with a different kind of adrenaline rush during filming… and it was all thanks to one scene.
“In episode three, I think, as a way of getting back with Stevie and kind of redeeming himself, Hayden writes a song, sort of a love song that he has to perform in front of Stevie and I actually had to sing and play the piano.”
Despite previously being in a choir and having a bit of piano practice up his sleeve, Alex describes the experience as “daunting”.
“It’s nerve-wracking getting in front of cast and crew and laying everything on the line for that,” he tells Girlfriend.
But clearly his performance didn’t deter anyone on set as Alex says that, a year after wrapping filming, the cast and crew are as “tight-knit” as ever – particularly him and Josh Heuston (Henry) who he describes as one of his “best mates” and who he had many laughs with during filming.
“We would be doing these scenes and if one of us was to screw up a line or get something wrong or be off timing or whatever it was, we just ended up bursting out in laughter because we couldn’t hold character for too long in most of our scenes.”
Season One of Dive Club is coming to Australian Netflix on November 29th.
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