Michael Packard says he “could totally relate” to the new whale-survival thriller *Whalefall* after living through his own 40-second nightmare inside a humpback.
The commercial lobster diver, then 56, was swallowed whole off Herring Cove Beach in Cape Cod, Mass., in June 2021 while diving for crustaceans on the ocean floor. Packard, now speaking with CNN following a screening of the film, found the fictional ordeal hit unsettlingly close to home.
“He was there where the tongue was contracting, and I could feel the tongue of my whale contracting on me, and the movements of this giant animal, so I could totally relate,” Packard said in the interview. The survivor added that even watching the trailer beforehand had given him “shiver bumps.”
The real-life incident began with what Packard described to the Cape Cod Times as “this huge shove” before everything went “completely black.” A humpback whale had engulfed him, and he could feel the enormous mammal squeezing as its tongue contracted against his body. Trapped in darkness, Packard believed his life was ending.
“This is it, Michael. This is it. This is how you die,” he recalled telling himself during those seconds inside the whale.
The film *Whalefall*, released October 16, adapts Daniel Kraus’s 2023 novel about Jay Gardiner, a diver searching for his father’s remains off the California coast who gets swallowed by a sperm whale and must escape as his oxygen depletes. The fictional premise closely mirrors Packard’s own race against time, though the movie was not directly inspired by his experience.
Packard’s survival hinged on a sudden upward movement by the whale. When the animal reached the surface, it began shaking its head erratically, and roughly 40 seconds after being swallowed, Packard saw daylight again. He found himself floating on the surface, watching the whale’s tail descend back into the depths.
“I was just laying on the surface floating and saw his tail and he went back down, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I got out of that, I survived,” Packard said.
At the time of the 2021 incident, Packard’s two sons were 12 and 15 years old. He has said that his family — his wife and those two boys — dominated his thoughts while trapped inside the whale, giving him something to fight for even as he accepted what seemed like certain death.
The diver’s account gained international attention in 2021 as one of the rare documented cases of a human surviving inside a whale, with marine biologists noting that humpbacks typically do not swallow large prey due to their narrow esophagi. Packard’s escape before being forced deeper into the whale’s digestive system likely saved his life.
*Whalefall* arrives in theaters October 16.