Whale Shark Jack: Abbie Cornish and Alyla Browne on free diving, conservation and filming on Ningaloo Reef

Every movie is hard to make, especially one with lots of underwater sequences like Whale Shark Jack, but there are worse places to work than Ningaloo Reef.

“Oh my gosh, wow,” Abbie Cornish agrees over a Zoom call with STM and young co-star Alyla Browne.

“Ningaloo Reef is unbelievably beautiful, the oceanic life is insane.”

After an early brush with fame, alongside Miranda Kerr in a teen modelling competition in Dolly magazine, Cornish enjoyed a breakthrough opposite Sam Worthington in the 2004 drama, Somersault.

“What Somersault gave me was a gateway to real filmmaking and a gateway to what it is to really make a story, no matter what platform it’s on, that holds weight,” Cornish says. “So it kind of gave me everything.”

From there, she has built an enviable list of acting credits. She played Bradley Cooper’s girlfriend in Limitless, joined the star-studded ensemble of Seven Psychopaths with Woody Harrelson and Colin Farrell, and was part of the SAG-winning cast of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Whale Shark Jack sees the 43-year-old trade big-name castmates for a literally big castmate, the titular fish, which is the subject of her character Nita’s research into the migratory paths of these majestic creatures.

Jack forms an unlikely bond with Nita’s daughter Sarah, played by Browne, but a tragedy forces them to give up life at sea for a permanent home in Exmouth, where the young girl is a proverbial fish out of water.

It was all in a day’s work for Browne, who played the younger Furiosa in George Miller’s epic, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

“It was insane. It was very fast-paced, and it was unlike any other film I had done so far when I filmed it, and I don’t think I’m ever going to do anything else like it, unless it’s with George,” Browne says of Furiosa.

“George had the patience and he cared enough to teach me about filmmaking, and not just direct me, so it was like a whole, crazy, massive workshop, which I am so eternally grateful for.”

Whale Shark Jack is adapted from the kids’ book of the same name by WA author Kathryn Lefroy, who also penned the screenplay.

It was a screenplay that required Browne to spend lots of time underwater.

“I definitely was very committed, because I was, like, ‘We need to get this shot, this shot is going to be insane’, so holding your breath is a lot about the mindset,” Brown says.

“You get a build-up of CO2, that’s what your brain detects, and that’s why you feel like you need a break, but it’s nothing to do with running out of oxygen.

“So, when you’re thinking, ‘That’s it, I actually can’t hold any longer’, you can go on for double that amount.”

Cornish, Browne and Michael Dorman (For All Mankind), who plays the patriarch of the family, convened in Perth a month before shooting started for free-diving training, which also produced unintended benefits.

“We built our family, we worked with our cast and our crew . . . and we just moved into this environment together, and it was really beautiful,” Cornish says.

In addition to stunning shots of Ningaloo and Exmouth, the film documents the First Nations connection to country, something that Cornish cites as a key reason for her involvement.

“I like the fact that we’re not only giving breath to whale sharks, but we’re also giving breath to Indigenous Australian culture,” she says.

“We’re not looking at a country that was just only born or bred or colonised 200 years ago; this is a long, long, long, long time ago, and to share those places and that cadence and that story was very important to me, I think, as an Australian.”

Cornish says the film has a “deep message” about Indigenous culture, but also about conservation, with the implication that living on this great continent of ours comes with great responsibility, too.

A responsibility to preserve places as special as Ningaloo Reef, so kids can enjoy it in the future, just as Browne did while making the film.

“That experience in Exmouth was one that I will never, ever forget in my whole entire life,” she says.

“And I crave every day to go back there, where this beautiful, vibrant red desert with dingoes meets this turquoise ocean of beautiful coral reef, and it’s so untouched, and it’s got such a great community.”

Whale Shark Jack premieres on April 2 on Stan.