Finn Cole doesn’t just star in Last Breath—he very nearly became a professional saturation diver in the process. “By the point that we got to start rolling the cameras, Simu [Liu] and I both felt comfortable enough that I think we could have almost done the job for real,” he says. “Not that we want to, by the way.” Smart move, considering the actual divers in the true story the film’s based on spend a month sleeping in a chamber the size of a double bed, breathing helium, and sounding like cartoon chipmunks for 30 days straight. “Terrifying,” Cole says, with the calm of a man who did his research and still said yes.
The film, directed by Alex Parkinson (who also helmed the 2019 documentary version), dramatizes the miraculous survival of a commercial diver stranded 200 feet under the North Sea. But for Cole, it was also an acting gig that let him indulge a love of learning new skills—especially ones that come with wetsuits and danger. “The actual diving, learning the skills—I mean, it’s great,” he says. “You just feel on top of the world.” He even likened it to acting: “You have to get yourself into a comfortable, meditative state… away from distractions. As a diver, you really have to do the same.”
Physical challenges seem to be a trend for Cole lately. He’s got a boxing film on the way, adding that he’s been “trying to build on” those skills too. But if he gets his way, the next movie won’t involve punching or plunging into deep water. It’ll be about music. “I really want to do a project where I play a musician. I’d love some one-to-one proper guitar teaching. That’s the next thing I really want to learn.” While in Malta shooting Last Breath, he found himself jamming with local blues musicians and getting the bug again. “I was a bit of a bedroom guitarist, but I hadn’t jammed with other people for a long time,” he says. “I got that bug back.”
So who would Cole play in a dream music biopic? “I’ve been obsessed with John Martyn since I was a kid,” he says, before hedging, “Not a particularly nice man to a lot of people, but the music says something completely different.” He’s realistic about the task: “It would have to be… years of practice. The right director. The right people.” But the glimmer is there. “That’s the character I’d be closest to portraying based on the fact that I’m just totally obsessed.”
He’s also got thoughts on the future of music biopics. Yes, he’s impressed by the big swings—“Timothée doing Bob Dylan, Jeremy Allen White doing Springsteen”—but he’s more interested in the hidden stories. “Rodriguez, for example. That story needs to be made into a film,” he says, referencing Searching for Sugar Man. “Those folk stories. That’s where the magic is.”
Cole’s been chasing those stories since Peaky Blinders, a role that still follows him around—sometimes literally. “People come up to you in the street and tell you that they hate you. You go, ‘Great! That means I did my job right.’” And while he loved playing Michael Gray, he admits it was hard watching the character go dark. “It’s always hard to see your character change for the worse in terms of story, but arguably change for the better in terms of new challenges.” That arc made him more open to embracing “characters that people aren’t going to like. It’s just as important as having the Tommy Shelby character.”
As for Last Breath, Cole hopes audiences come away moved—and grateful. “It’s about teamwork, perseverance, survival. There’s no villain. The villain is the accident. Everything had to go right for this story to end the way it did.”
And maybe also, it’s about disco lights underwater. Between takes, the crew would blast Underworld’s “Born Slippy” through underwater speakers and turn on what can only be described as a scuba rave. “There’s a video on my Instagram of me doing some real dad dancing,” he confesses. “But honestly, we had so much fun.”
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
