Netflix’s Crew Girl is a new teen drama series that thrusts the intense, insular world of rowing straight into the mainstream spotlight—and the show's stars and creator know there's nothing like a little competitive edge to liven up a coming-of-age romance.
After all, there are few sports that demand the full-body strength and conditioning of rowing. According to USRowing, physiologists have famously claimed that rowing a 2,000-meter race inflicts the same physical toll as playing back-to-back basketball games. Yet, despite that inherent intensity, Hollywood has largely left the sport’s untapped drama stranded on the shore—with rare exceptions like George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat, the indie thriller The Novice, and a handful of documentaries.
Debuting September 10, the show centers on Teagan Tao (Miku Martineau), a promising single sculls rower whose life is upended after her luxury hotelier father, David, is accused of misappropriating tens of millions of dollars. Forced to relocate with her mother, Ella (Jessica Paré), from California to Ella’s small Massachusetts hometown of Eagle’s Cove, Teagan starts over at Easton Prep.
Much to Teagan’s dismay, the prestigious private school—which only began accepting female students two years prior—does not have a girls’ rowing team. But after catching the eye of coach Matt Hayden (Thomas Cadrot), Teagan is tapped to lead the dysfunctional boys’ varsity crew as their coxswain. Juggling her own rowing ambitions with the challenge of being an outsider in an old-money institution, Teagan finds herself unexpectedly caught between the team’s two fiercest rivals: arrogant captain Josh Regis (Samuel Braun) and quiet, intensely driven underdog Cam Dillinger (Kyle Clark).
“Adolescence is sometimes messy and doesn’t go as planned,” Martineau tells Teen Vogue in this exclusive first look at Crew Girl. “Teagan is such an independent young woman where sometimes she feels like she’s more of an adult, but she’s a 16-year-old girl who’s figuring out her own life. Throughout the season, she’s navigating her relationship with her family, but also these new friendships and romances at this school. I think every teenager goes through that.”
In the spring of 2025, Finding Her Edge showrunner Jeff Norton—who also executive produces Crew Girl—approached fellow Canadian writers Vivian Lin and Morwyn Brebner about developing a rowing show. Lin, who is also the Crew Girl showrunner, spent two days that May crafting the premise and co-writing the pilot with Brebner. Within weeks, Netflix ordered an eight-episode first season.
But although Crew Girl was filmed in British Columbia last fall and features almost exclusively Canadian talent on both sides of the camera, Lin admits that the show she and Brebner pitched was always set in the U.S. “We were inspired by this private school that is in Massachusetts—one of the feeder schools to your Harvard elites,” Lin says. “Is there a version that could be set in Canada? Totally. Canada has a very robust rowing culture, and it’s been really interesting to dive into how all of our rowers go everywhere in the world.”
Finding the Crew
Lin knew competitive rowing was fertile ground for exploring character relationships; she previously worked on an episode of the Canadian police procedural drama Hudson & Rex about a university rower who is fatally shot by a sniper during a team practice. “It’s a beautiful sport where it’s absolutely zen in the rhythm of it,” she says. “It’s very addictive, it’s very technical, and it’s hyper-competitive because you really have to be one of the most competitive people in the world just to survive one race, because the cardio is so massive.”
Before cameras rolled, Lin relied heavily on the expertise of writer Julian Doucet, who comes from a rowing family, as well as elite rowers such as former Olympic silver medalist Anna van der Kamp. “We talked a lot to really get all the rowing correct and to get the personalities correct as well,” Lin says.
But when she began working on the pilot, Lin always envisioned Teagan as a young Asian American woman. “There’s a thing in scriptwriting where you have to pick the last name for your character,” she explains. “I was like, ‘I’m an Asian person. I’m just going to go with an Asian name, because why not?’ Suddenly, that started a whole conversation of, ‘Could Teagan be Asian? What are we looking for?’ For me, a rower’s a rower, so [it doesn’t matter] if they’re Asian, white, Black, Latino.”
In Martineau, the producers found “that characteristic of a strong leader” who is “both competitive and soft,” Lin adds. “She was such a perfect fit that any conversation about the ethnicity of the lead, if there were ever any concerns, just melted away.”
For her part, Martineau—who grew up playing a variety of sports, including gymnastics, hockey and volleyball—saw reflections of her own independence and resilience in Teagan. “It’s really empowering to see a young woman pursue her desires and her passion while also allowing herself to be a young woman and make mistakes,” she notes. The significance of her casting is also not lost on Martineau, who is Japanese Canadian. “Growing up, I didn’t really see the leading actors on shows like these being of Asian descent, so I’m really happy about it. We live in a country that’s so diverse that we should see it on our screens.”
To find the eight male rowers, the producers had all auditioning actors submit self-tapes for two characters with entirely opposite personalities. From there, the creative team mixed and matched actors into different roles for callbacks. Martineau did Zoom chemistry reads with four finalists—two for Josh, two for Cam—before producers officially settled on Braun and Clark. Lin reveals that the other two remaining actors were still cast in the show, though she declines to specify which roles they took.
The rest of the crew is made up of an eclectic group of guys: Ryder Regis (Connor Paton), who has always been stuck in his cousin Josh’s shadow; troublemaker Damon Quaid (Vincent Muller); strait-laced Noah Bainbridge (Riley Davis); Perry Chou (Connor Wong), described as “always on trend, never on rhythm”; Chris (Jarrett Carlington), a junior nicknamed “Crab Catcher”; and Baloo Garner (Jude Wilson), the “twibling” of Josh’s girlfriend Britney (Sage Linder). (Their mother used two surrogates at the same time.)
Much of the drama in the first season boils down to who will claim the stroke seat—the position responsible for setting the boat’s stroke rate, cadence, and rhythm. Despite some initial resistance from the guys, Teagan begins to forge a unique bond with each of her teammates—though two of those connections spark into something far more complicated.
The Clash of Oars
In the pilot, Teagan spends her first afternoon in Eagle’s Cove biking around town—only to crash into the back of Cam’s pickup truck right outside of his family’s auto shop. “I think it’s a very funny scene, just how these two fell into each other’s lives,” Clark says of the characters’ meet-cute. “What Cam immediately is drawn to is the fact that this girl is not the typical person that he would be going to school with. He finds some safety in her, because he maybe senses that her perspective is quite similar [to his].”
Unlike many of his classmates, Cam comes from a lower middle-class background and attends Easton Prep on a rowing scholarship. Having grown up in the Canadian Prairies, where he watched his own father work as a welder, Clark says he related to his character’s blue-collar upbringing. Cam ultimately “sees rowing as his ticket out,” Clark says. “He’s going to get a good education. He wants to row in the Olympics. And through doing that, he’s going to be able to help his family.”
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But even though he feels a “brotherhood” with his crewmates on the water, “he automatically has a chip on his shoulder because he doesn’t fit into this world socially,” Clark continues. “The thing he’s aiming for is to become stroke seat, but it’s not something that can really happen because the team doesn’t have his back. So, as an outsider, that resentment builds, but it also pushes him to work even harder.”
The current stroke seat belongs to Josh, a douchey sixth-generation Easton Prep student whose family owns the boathouse on campus. “He ticks all the boxes of the typical prep school jock, but the show starts at a very interesting point in his life,” Braun says, teasing that Josh is more than meets the eye. “A lot of people don’t realize the weight that is on Josh’s shoulders, and there’s a secret that he’s holding that no one else knows. So when Teagan joins the mix, she ends up being a catalyst for his evolution.”
Teagan’s arrival particularly emboldens Ryder to compete with Josh for pole position, which has consequences that go beyond rowing. “They’re battling for their family’s love because in their world, rowing is the way that you get any achievement or status in the family. It’s a way to prove yourself as worthy of being the person to take over the family business,” Lin explains. Josh’s grandfather, the CEO of the Regis family airline, “has this list of things that you have to do in order to become a part of the company,” Braun adds. “So it’s not just this status that he’s trying to uphold, but there’s a lot of money riding on the line for him.”
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Braun and Clark agree that Teagan helps both of their characters become more effective leaders in their own right. Although Teagan may share more in common with Cam, she does not have to censor herself around Josh. “What I appreciate about Teagan is she is strongheaded, and she says what she thinks,” Martineau says. “That [quality] intertwines with her relationships with both of the boys, and brings out more vulnerable and honest sides to them.”
While the actors describe Crew Girl as an original entry into the young-adult genre, the series clearly shares DNA with its predecessors. According to Lin, the fact that Crew Girl feels like a CW show from a bygone era is by design. “After our first table read, Thomas, who plays Hayden, came up to me, and he was like, ‘So… Gossip Girl and Friday Night Lights, on a boat?’” Lin recalls with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Yep, you got it.’”
Of course, with any good love triangle, there is the obvious, overarching question: Should Teagan end up with Cam or Josh? “In my mind, Cam is more like the boy next door who’s so sweet and gentle, and Josh is a bit more fiery and the popular boy. They’re both so charming in different ways, and I’m going to let the audience decide because I can’t pick,” Martineau says, before defaulting to the politically correct answer: “I am team Teagan!”
Clark reasons that most people look for romantic partners they can envision sharing a life with. “Cam is someone who values family, and he does what it takes to look after people. He has a really good heart and comes from a very loving family,” Clark remarks. “I think Teagan would love to be within that world—and they both love rowing. I don’t know that Josh loves rowing the way Cam does, and I think Cam might love rowing the way that Teagan does.”
Braun playfully counter-argues that “if Teagan was in her late 30s and looking to settle down, Cam might be a viable option.” But Teagan “needs someone who can go toe to toe with her, who can have that banter [with her],” Braun says. “As their relationship goes on, they learn more about each other that they didn’t once know.”
The One That Got Away
A sequence in the second episode reveals that Teagan’s relationship with rowing remains inextricably linked to her father, who is now on the run. While she still relies heavily on his teachings, Teagan’s new circumstances force her to grow closer with her mother, who left Eagle’s Cove 20 years earlier.
Given that “she had been a little bit more sheltered” than Teagan and was completely blindsided by her husband’s criminal charges, Ella spends the first season “trying to figure out how to put her life together after it’s been so brutally torn apart,” Lin says. The writers were also keen to explore Ella’s identity outside of being a mother—to show her “reconnecting with who she used to be, and opening herself up to the one that got away.”
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That special someone is none other than coach Hayden, who grew up with Ella and stayed behind to start his own family. As Ella and Teagan settle into their new life on the East Coast, Lin promises that the duo will eventually gain clarity about David’s alleged crimes—and those answers will arrive at a particularly “inconvenient” time.
“Rowing” in the Deep
Remarkably, for a show centered on competitive rowing, the cast had zero prior experience with the sport. Forced into a one-month training camp to get into peak condition, the actors quickly bonded through the process of learning to row. “I actually think it’s a great exercise to do with any cast,” Lin says, “because the whole point is you can’t go anywhere unless you all go together, which is a lot like acting.”
Braun and Clark have known each other since 2019, when they were both deep in the running for Netflix’s The Hardy Boys adaptation. Despite not booking those roles, they kept in touch and ultimately landed their big break together; Crew Girl is the biggest project that either actor has ever led. “When I heard that Kyle got the part for Cam, I was like, ‘No way! This is finally happening,’” says Braun, who was born and raised in Vancouver. “We’ve been working so hard towards this [dream].”
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Whereas Martineau learned to row on weekends while filming a sci-fi project in upstate New York, Braun and Clark—the first two male rowers to be cast—got a head start together at the Vancouver Rowing Club. Braun was thrilled to see familiar faces gradually join the production—estimating he already knew “about 80% of the boys on the team”—but the staggered casting presented a unique hurdle on the water. “We’d start getting the hang of rowing, and then you’d get another person on the boat and that was their first time,” Braun recalls, noting how easily the boat’s rhythm could get disrupted.
Under the tutelage of Olympic gold-winning coxswain Terry Paul, the male actors spent two weeks learning the fundamentals and working out together in Vancouver. After finishing her previous project, Martineau joined her castmates for an additional two weeks of training near Vancouver Island, just before production began on Victoria’s scenic Elk/Beaver Lake and Gorge Waterway.
Capturing the realism of the sport required two distinct filming setups. The crew utilized a floating camera barge that towed the actors’ boat to capture tight shots with a crane, and then alternated that setup with drone footage of the cast rowing completely untethered. That meant the actors sometimes logged 8 to 10 hours on the water a day, just to capture the high-octane racing sequences. “When we were actually strapped to this barge, we were still pulling blades through water, even though we weren’t actually moving the boat,” Clark adds.
Since wrapping filming last December, the leads admit they haven’t exactly been keeping up with their rowing habits. Martineau sometimes uses the ergometer at the gym, but because she is currently filming the second season of Netflix’s Bet, her schedule is filled with “doing different kinds of training for other physical things.” Clark reveals that his Vancouver-based castmates are trying to plan a day to get back out on the water together, while Braun notes that “a lot of us are staying in shape” in the event that Crew Girl is renewed for season 2.
Ultimately, the grueling experience of bringing the sport to the screen has given the entire cast and creative team a newfound reverence for the craft. “You meet people at these rowing clubs and they’ve rowed for years,” Clark says, “so everyone felt that pressure and really wanted to do a good job for the show, and put in the work for the people who actually do this and give them something that they can really cherish.”
