A Newfoundlander got a random call from a bunch of Hollywood stars — and just went with it

Paul Matthews was at home washing blueberries in Brigus, N.L., last month, when he got a call from a woman he didn’t know. He told her she’d called a wrong number, but then they started chatting — and Matthews stayed on the line. 

“Why not?” Matthews told The Current on Friday. “I’m just picking through blueberries and life is good and I’m just relaxed.”

The woman said her “chubby fingers” must have dialled the wrong number — but that was a fib. On the other end of the line, it was really Jax Irwin, a broadcaster who makes viral videos cold calling phone numbers on the East Coast, just to chat. 

On that particular day, she was calling random numbers to film a promotional video with the cast of a new Netflix show, Below, filmed and set in Newfoundland and starring Josh Hartnett, Charlie Heaton and Mackenzie Davis. 

“We wanted to stay true to calling completely random numbers,” Irwin told The Current. 

“Mackenzie and Charlie and Josh, they’ve spent, obviously, a lot of time in Newfoundland. So they were equally pleased, excited, and also familiar with how lovely folks from Newfoundland can be.”

Matthews delivered. They chatted about Brigus, its beautiful rock walls and winding paths. He told her he used to be the town’s deputy mayor but was getting older now. When Irwin called him a mover and a shaker, he said these days he’s “moving slower and shaking more.”

But Matthews had his own surprise in store. He’d heard an interview with Irwin on The Current, just the week before.

“I was listening to CBC Radio and they had this lady on and she does this as a sort of a hobby, she cold calls people,” he told her that day, prompting a stunned Irwin to respond: “Can I tell you a secret? That’s that lonely woman who calls people, calling you right now.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Matthews replied.

Irwin told The Current she “couldn’t have asked for a better person to pick up the phone.”

Netflix released the video of their call on social media this week, where it’s already racked up almost 900,000 views across TikTok, Facebook and Instagram.

Matthews said he’s had a lot of calls and texts from family and friends who’ve seen the video. He joked he might need to hire a publicist.

“I think I am on second nine of the 10 seconds of fame,” he laughed.

Below, which premiered this week on Netflix, stars Hartnett as a fisherman in a small Newfoundland town that is terrorized by an unknown sea creature.

Harnett spoke to CBC Radio’s Q this week and said the people of St. John’s really helped him prepare for the role, from a fisherman who showed him how to tie nets, to locals who taught him how to properly use “skeet” in a sentence. 

“You get this sort of feeling of being in a place that has its own type of magic,” he told Q. “What that is, I can’t really put a finger on, but it feels unlike anything else.”

Matthews, second from right, ended up attending a screening of Below with his wife Tina Matthews, right, and daughter Zara Tai Matthews. They met the star of the show, actor Josh Hartnett. (Netflix)

Hartnett also listened to hours of CBC’s Newfoundland show, The Broadcast, to nail the accent — with Matthews saying the overall cast did “reasonably well” on that score.

The streaming giant also invited Matthews and his family to attend a screening of the show in St. John’s, where he said they got to chat with Hartnett and were very well looked after. In another coincidence, his daughter, Zara Tai Matthews, appears in the show’s sixth episode.

Irwin started making the calls in part because she felt lonely and homesick after moving to Toronto from Dartmouth, N.S. She’s not too worried about people knowing it’s her calling, if the extra publicity blows her cover.

“I also don’t want to be too much of a sneaky snake, right? So if people know what I’m doing, I’m just always happy to connect with anybody who will pick up the phone,” she said.

Matthews thinks Irwin is doing good by making these connections, and he can see why she calls smaller communities on the East Coast to have these chats. 

“People in those big cities are just so rushed, and I well appreciate that,” he said. 

“What may be one of the very attractive features of our lifestyle is that we take time to live and enjoy the vagaries of life, wherever they come.”