Charlbi Dean unexpectedly died shortly after the film's release from sepsis, which was caused by the bacteria called Capnocytophaga. This was complicated by the fact that she had lost her spleen several years before in a car accident. She was just 32.
In a podcast interview, Dolly De Leon said her character Abigail was supposed to be a male mechanic of the yacht, but when Östlund pitched the film to his students, one suggested that it would be more interesting if the character were a woman.
When he landed the part of Carl, Harris Dickinson was told that his character was a car mechanic before he became a model. Dickinson duly did a lot of intense research into the profession, only to find when he arrived on set that that detail had been excised from the script.
The yacht scenes were shot on the Cristina O, the former yacht of the Onassis family. The crew only had nine days to shoot on it, which cost a lot of money, and the shoot ended the day before another lockdown came into effect. Director Ruben Östlund admits that if it had happened a few days earlier, he doesn't know how they would have managed to finish the movie.
The character Dimitri is modeled after Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch who likewise made his fortune with fertilizer, also owns a superyacht and became world famous as the vendor of da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi" in 2017 at a profit of an estimated 273 million dollars.