Every good bank heist film and series has an elaborate plan executed well, from the Professor’s schemes in Money Heist to the iconic Mini Coopers chase in the 1969’s The Italian Job. Now Kaleidoscope will be adding to this genre with a unique heist of its own.
Warning—there are some spoilers below.
In Netflix‘s new drama Leo Pap (Giancarlo Esposito) puts together a crew in order to break into the “unbeatable” vault of Roger Salas (Rufus Sewell), with whom he shares a dark past and is determined to get revenge on.
The vault has $7 billion in its care, more or less, and Leo and his crew hatch an intricately detailed plan to get inside without triggering any of its alarms, and one part of that involved being underwater.
Esposito told Newsweek about filming these scenes, which are featured in the show’s finale “White,” and joked about how he “scared the c*** out of” the show’s crew while he was underwater. The actor spoke about the scenes alongside Jai Courtney and Rosaline Elbay who play Bob and Judy Goodwin, respectively.
‘Kaleidoscope’s’ Giancarlo Esposito, Jai Courtney and Rosaline Elbay on Filming Bank Heist Scenes
Netflix
There were a number of things at play in Kaleidoscope’s bank heist, but the most important factor is how the team used a sudden storm to their advantage, even if striking during a hurricane means they will have to deal with rising water levels within the vault.
To create this scene, Esposito had to remain underwater for a significant amount of time when Leo becomes trapped, and he put his skills as a diver to good use.
“For me it was kind of amazing because there were a lot of physical elements that I had to jump into, i.e. being underwater, swimming, escaping, all those things,” the actor said.
“I remember doing one take where I just went way underwater and I was down there for a long, long time, and they had scuba guys in the bottom they had a pipe I could breathe out of, all this stuff, and I just wanted to free dive because I’m a diver, I’m a swimmer.
“They had a speaker so you can hear what they were saying and I was down there forever on one breath and so it helped me physically to understand that I had to do something with my body, […] but I scared the c*** out of them. They were like, ‘No! Giancarlo stop! [screams]’ and I was just chilling, I was all good.”
The Breaking Bad star explained that he tried to take note of how jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk used circular breathing to play three saxophones at a time, and applied that to his work in Kaleidoscope.
He added that the cast was filming scenes with water rising in the room in real time, meaning they felt the same time pressure that their characters would have been under: “Adrenaline works for us as actors. I remember all of us being downstairs, Jai, all of us, in this heist place and it was great because the clock is ticking and the water was at 4 feet, then it was at 6 feet, then it was at 14 feet, it was like ‘wow, we’re really doing this!’
“It’s so real, and I had to get stuck and all these things that lend to the dynamic of the excitement that you’re going to see during the season.”
Although it serves as the show’s finale and is set around halfway through the narrative’s timeline, the heist scenes were filmed first by the Kaleidoscope cast, Elbay and Courtney explained.
“It serves as the finale, if you will, but chronologically doesn’t take place at the end, but we started there,” Courtney said. “Probably because it was, I would dare say, the most challenging to film, certainly from a production standpoint there is a few extra larger moving parts so it was important to kind of get that in and tackle it.
“But, in saying that, you’re filming something that is layered with all of the details we’re yet to learn and that went for us as actors as well, so [it was] pretty tough.”
He went on: “It was interesting, and it’s hard not to sometimes miss things or wish you gave something a little touch of, a little sprinkling of something that maybe ties back to early on [in the story], but that was just one of the things that kept us on our toes and I think we all had fun doing that.
“And if you were really able to help keep things [on] track it was satisfying and, fortunately, we had a lot of great minds around us and supporting us, and a great ensemble [cast] to kind of do that.”
Elbay concurred with her co-star, adding: “It was really fun. There was something really lovely as well about it, even though it was a very challenging episode to shoot first, was how easy it was to jump in together and do these very challenging sequences and also layer these relationships that kind of come to a head in this episode.
“Very, very big things happen and it was really lovely to already feel like we could infuse that into those performances even though later you kind of wake up in the middle of the night like ‘dammit, if five months ago I’d known then I would have done that […]!'”
Kaleidscope is out now on Netflix.