Vancouver Aquarium's octopus the inspiration for Remarkably Bright Creatures co-star (original) (raw)
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Vancouver Aquarium's octopus the inspiration for Remarkably Bright Creatures co-star
Sally Field stars in new film that was shot in and around Deep Cove.
Published May 07, 2026 • Last updated May 07, 2026 • 6 minute read
In the new Netflix film Remarkably Bright Creatures Sally Field plays Tova, a woman who cleans an aquarium at night and shares her thoughts and concerns with Marcellus the Octopus, which is voiced by Alfred Molina. Courtesy of Netflix
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The new Vancouver-shot film Remarkably Bright Creatures is a welcome distraction from the daily dose of bad news.
Streaming now, the touching Netflix adaptation, directed by Olivia Newman, and based on the book by American writer Shelby Van Pelt, follows Tova (Sally Field), a senior widow who also lost her 18-year-old son 30 years earlier.
In the new Netflix film Remarkably Bright Creatures, premiering May 8, Sally Field stars as a grieving woman whose life changes dramatically when a 30-something man (played by Lewis Pullman) shows up in her small town. Standing in for the small Washington state town that Field’s character calls home is Deep Cove. Photo by Netflix /Courtesy of Netflix
Tova works nights as a cleaner at the local aquarium where she forms a bond with a Giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus (voiced perfectly by Alfred Molina). Tova’s life gets shaken up when 30-year-old Cameron (Lewis Pullman) shows up in her small coastal town, and the pair become close as they unravel the truth about Tova’s son.
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While the 2022 novel grew out of uncertain COVID-19 times, its message of hope, friendship, community and connection still rings true today.
“Unfortunately, as I sit here in 2026 perhaps for somewhat different reasons, I feel like I’m still saying that we still need this,” said the Chicago-based Van Pelt about her story’s positive messaging. “I think it is a thing that all the characters in the book are fundamentally sort of good people — people or octopuses — that you want to root for. They are certainly very, very flawed and have their things that irritate us and that frustrate us, but there’s not a bad guy, there’s not a dark force. It’s just really good, really flawed people sort of trying to figure it out.”
Set in the fictional town of Sowell Bay, Wash., (played by Deep Cove), Van Pelt explains her story is a homage to her Tacoma-area childhood.
“One of the things that I really wanted to accomplish with this book was to describe the Pacific Northwest to people who hadn’t been there,” said Van Pelt, adding that describing the area through the eyes of Cameron who came from California “was really fun.”
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The writing of the novel, Van Pelt’s first, offered her a silver lining during the pandemic shutdown that kept her from travelling to Washington state to visit family.
“I just remember thinking, ‘When am I ever gonna go home again?’ … We just didn’t know, especially in those early weeks. There was no certainty of anything,” said Van Pelt. “So, retreating into this manuscript that took place there definitely helped sort of ease some of the homesickness, the uncertainty, just really the grief over missing this place that I love so much.”
When it was released in 2022, the novel became an instant New York Times bestseller and has gone on to sell four million copies. It resonated so deeply with readers that they reached out to her in many ways, including sending her all manner of octopuses, many of them finding homes on her office bookshelves.
“These are all mostly from people who have brought them to me in signing lines. I have so many of them,” said Van Pelt, who has also been gifted wooden Swedish Dal horse figurines, which also play a role in Remarkably Bright Creatures. “It’s my octopus garden.”
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It’s no wonder people sent her all manner of octopuses, as Marcellus is an endearingly wise and entertainingly cynical and curmudgeonly escape artist — Tova often has to help him back into his tank — who offers insightful and funny opinions about the humans he sees moving through the aquarium.
Shelby Van Pelt is seen here at the Los Angeles Premiere of Netflix’s cinematic adaptation of her hit novel Remarkably Bright Creatures. A lot of the charming and entertaining film starring Sally Field and Lewis Pullman was shot in Deep Cove and at the Vancouver Aquarium. Photo by Brianna Bryson /Getty Images
Van Pelt, who had tanks of lizards in her childhood bedroom and has always had “a soft spot for things that maybe aren’t as traditionally as cute and cuddly,” settled on an octopus for her story after a good-old-fashion internet information adventure.
“The octopus obsession really started after going down an internet rabbit hole and learning about them and just thinking about the novelty of that character or that voice, specifically in relation to their intelligence, and feeling the tension of keeping an animal that intelligent in captivity,” said Van Pelt. “I didn’t want it to be too heavy and dark on that theme. But (to show) the frustration that that animal must feel (and) if they could have a voice, how would they respond to the humans that are around them, which in their mind, are not as smart as they are?”
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The idea that the octopus believes he’s intellectually superior to the two-legged aquarium visitors comes across in many funny ways in the film. For instance, during a visit from a group of Grade 3 students, a boy named Kevin presses his face to the tank and complains that he can’t see Marcellus.
“That’s because I’m camouflaged Kevin, read the plaque,” says an obviously perturbed Marcellus.
Marcellus’s voice is Molina’s, and his body is a spectacular CG construct based on, according to Van Pelt, a real Giant Pacific octopus named Agnetha, which lives in the Vancouver Aquarium and gets a bit of screen time in the new movie.
“It was just very clear from the beginning that this is what he sounds like. This is his attitude. A curmudgeon,” said Van Pelt. “Maybe I had been a grumpy old man in a prior life. It came very naturally to me.”
Marcellus — his name a mash-up of the famous Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius — may come across dismissive and a bit judgmental, but it’s also clear he’s very curious about the humans he observes.
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“There’s something also wonderfully childlike about Marcellus,” said Van Pelt. “He’s so curious. He’s bored, and the humans are, in a way, his entertainment … (to him, humans) don’t say what they mean. Their words don’t make sense; their actions don’t make sense. He sort of struggles to understand the human world the same way that a toddler might struggle to understand the adults in their lives.”
Marcellus’s connection with and concern for the still grief-stricken and closed-off Tova, who speaks to him about her life as she polishes the smudges off the glass from his tank, allows for the bigger concepts of life and death to be unpacked.
“It’s very effective in getting into some of those harder issues,” said Van Pelt. “It takes the sort of the seriousness of it.”
Lewis Pullman and Sally Field star in the Netflix film Remarkably Bright Creatures. The film, which premieres May 8, was adapted from the best-selling book by Shelby Van Pelt. Photo by Netflix /Courtesy of Netflix
The movie was shot in Vancouver last spring with locations including Deep Cove and the Vancouver Aquarium. Van Pelt, who has an executive producer credit on the film, said her time on the Deep Cove set was a wonderful experience and explained seeing two-time-Oscar-winner Field struck a happy nostalgic chord for her.
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“In the book, the character of Tova is sort of written in homage to my grandmother. And it’s odd because I feel like my grandmother looked a little bit like Sally Field. They have the same stature, kind of a similar face shape. The way that they had done her wardrobe and hair and makeup for the film, was very much like my grandma Anna,” said Van Pelt.
“It was a little strange, because I was like, ‘That’s her, that’s the character, and my grandma Anna is there in her,’ so that was a little bit of a thing that made me kind of tear up a little bit. But then I had to get it together, because I got to do background work that day, which was also really fun.”
Van Pelt plays a patron in the bar where Cameron gets up and plays a song.
With the movie out now and the novel likely to get another sales bump due to the publicity around the film, Van Pelt hopes viewers and readers will take away a simple message from the story.
“It’s really never too late to make a change,” said Van Pelt. “Marcellus, in the story, is stuck in his tank. And it’s very much also a story about humans being stuck. And, in their journey, to get sort of unstuck.”
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