‘Outer Banks’ stars Rudy Pankow, Madison Bailey break down ‘daunting’ near-death scuba diving moment

“Actually doing it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be,” Bailey said.

While there are a number of interesting turns in Netflix’s Outer Banks Season 4, Part 1, JJ (Rudy Pankow) is the character that kept us on our toes. From letting emotions get the best of him during the property auction, resulting in the Pogues overpaying for “Poguelandia 2.0,” to betting their last gold nugget on a dirt bike race against the Kooks, JJ hasn’t made things easier for John B (Chase Stokes), Sarah (Madelyn Cline), Kiara (Madison Bailey), Pope (Jonathan Daviss) and Cleo (Carlacia Grant).

“Growing up is a huge fear of JJ’s,” Rudy Pankow told Yahoo Canada. “Responsibility and figuring out if his friends are going to stay with him for the rest of his life can cause him to have a lot of anxiety.”

This image released by Netflix shows Chase Stokes as John B, left, and Rudy Pankow as JJ, in a scene from “Outer Banks.” (Jackson Lee Davis/Netflix via AP)

As Kiara says in the first episode of the season, “he just never really had a home,” and that pressure leads to questionable choices on JJ’s part. But he’s always ready to go to the extremes to find a solution as well.

“I think when he realizes that it might be his fault that he lost the money, … he feels guilty, and then he needs to, as usual, even though he might deny that it’s [his] fault, he takes it upon himself to try to make up for it,” Pankow said. “And that doesn’t always pan out in the best way.”

“It’s been a blast to portray that person of just like, ‘All right, what can I do?’ Crank it up. Crank it up all the way to however far you can go.”

Madison Bailey as Kiara in episode 402 of Outer Banks (Jackson Lee Davis/Netflix)

‘A crazy one’

With that came one of the more stress-inducing moments of the first part of the season, in the form of another near-death experience on the show.

JJ volunteers to scuba dive to look for the amulet that belonged to Blackbeard’s wife Elizabeth on the sunken ship, in exchange for Wes Genrette (David Jensen) paying the Pogues $50,000.

Kiara knows JJ can’t dive alone and decides to go with him, but there’s someone else down there, Lightner (Rigo Sanchez), who’s looking for the same thing. When he sees Kiara and JJ he tries to kill them, but they’re able to get themselves out of the water with the amulet.

It doesn’t end there. Kiara and JJ get the bends and have to spend 12 hours in a hyperbaric chamber. Of course, in true Pogue fashion, they break themselves out when Lightner shows up at the hospital.

“The scuba stuff is huge for Kiara, and mostly for Madison this season,” Madison Bailey said. “I think reading that on the page was a little daunting and then actually doing it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be.”

“The set was so impressive. This ship that they built and sunk in this pool was so cool, and swimming through it, I don’t know, you feel like a fish. Very interesting to breathe underwater. It’s a really crazy thing that I definitely, personally, wouldn’t have experienced otherwise, and it was a fun one. A crazy one.”

“It’s one of those scenes of where you’re like, ‘OK JJ, that was fast to volunteer yourself and say that we can scuba dive,'” Pankow added in a separate interview. “It was a great time filming that stuff because it was just such an amazing set to be able to explore.”