How ‘The Studio,’ ‘The Traitors,’ ‘Hacks’ and Other Emmy-nominated Shows Told Their Stories with Picture-Perfect Locations
The process of securing the proper locations for a project is a metaphorical game of 3D chess in which the artistic vision of its creative team wages a strategic battle with logistical necessities and economic realities. When it is played properly, as it was with this year’s crop of Emmy-nominated shows, the result is a win for all involved, including the viewer.
Here’s some food for thoughtfulness: When Casey Kriley and Jo Sharon of Magical Elves Prods. scouted Canadian restaurants to stage numerous culinary challenges for the Emmy-nominated 22nd season of Bravo’s “Top Chef,” subtitled “Destination Canada,” they tried to cause as little disruption for the host businesses as possible.
The entire shoot involving the 14 eateries was “often one day or even less” per episode.
“Sometimes it can even be a half a day,” Sharon says. “We try and work with restaurants in terms of their schedules. Obviously, they want to keep their restaurants open, which is as important to them as it is to us. Sometimes we’ll be starting at 7 a.m., so we can be out in time for dinner service.”
But there were some logistical challenges with some of the Toronto, Ontario and Calgary and Canmore, Alberta-based locations because of venue sizes.
“We’re pretty adaptable as a crew, but sometimes, if it’s a smaller restaurant and we can’t fit in all our cameras and chefs in terms of cooking stations, as well as the judges, we may not do our elimination challenge service in that restaurant,” says Kriley, whose team coordinated the locations with the assistance of Destination Canada, a Government of Canada-owned tourism marketing agency headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. “So, we’ll do what we call a ‘reality beat.’ Our chef may go and taste the food to be inspired for the challenge. Or they might learn something from the head chef at one of those restaurants. If we can’t achieve getting our whole crew in for an elimination service and challenge, we’ll pursue those locations in different ways.”
With gastronomic bases ranging from castles and ranches to warehouses and open spaces, all the businesses found themselves boosted by the on-air exposure generated by “Top Chef.”
“Last September, we got to host ‘Top Chef USA’ for their pizza challenge and it was a huge moment for us at Ravine Vineyard,” says John Vetere, executive chef and director of Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Estate Winery. “Having the show here put our restaurant and pizza program on the map in a way we couldn’t have done on our own. People from all over were coming in, fired up to try the pizzas they saw on TV. Our wines got some serious love, too. Fast forward to 2025: It ended up being our biggest year ever. Sales blew past what we were expecting.” — Nick Krewen
“Slow Horses” exec producer Doug Urbanski knows London locations, knows spy thrillers and knew what the Apple TV+ series needed to look like — and it wasn’t Sunday night British TV.
Urbanski, whose credits include “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “The Darkest Hour,” explains that while he’s a huge fan of British television, “Slow Horses” needed to look “more international.”
Based on the spy thrillers by Mick Herron, the series focuses on rumpled MI5 agent Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his misfit spy team. Season 5 is set for a Sept. 24 debut, and they are currently in post on Season 6.
The series showcases the workaday London, the grit, an anonymous little Chinese restaurant and, famously, Slough House, the rather Dickensian brick building that Lamb’s team works out of near London’s Barbican area, which stands in stark contrast to the steel and glass palace occupied by the bureaucratic strivers overseen by the chillingly efficient Diana Tavener (Kristin Scott Thomas).
Urbanski explains, “If you look at our exterior locations they’re sort of an ode to that question, ‘What kind of concrete were the English people using in the ’70s that was gonna look so awful now?’” Indeed, the series even spotlights the crumbling blocks of flats that some of the characters live in.
“So instead of close-ups of rats crawling along the top of houses of Parliament or garbage trucks, we did want to have the grittiness somehow but that stood apart. And the second we start to feel that we’re showing something that feels generic or familiar, we have a conversation about it, and we’ll immediately pull away and say, ‘No, it’s got to look a little bit more like this.’ We’re very attentive to that stuff.”
Urbanski says that “England is, for the most part, pretty good about giving you stuff — you have to pay, but they’re good.” Occasionally, they run into problems, like when they were trying to secure permission to shoot at one location from three different London borough councils, or the fact that the Regent’s Park canal used as a meeting point for Lamb and Tavener in several scenes of the last four seasons had no nearby bathrooms.
The series has had Lamb and Tavener doing a bit of spy business on the Duke of York steps adjacent to Buckingham Palace — yeah, it’s a tourist spot, but, Urbanski says, “we need those sort of set pieces, because what is better than two spies passing a file in public by the Duke of York steps?” — Carole Horst
In the ’60s and ’70s, when Los Angeles was the unrivaled central hub of television production, the city and its surrounding environs were called on to stand in for any and all locales, from Korea (“MASH,” shot in what is now Malibu State Creek Park) to the home planet of the Gorn (“Arena,” a 1967 episode of “Star Trek” where Captain Kirk goes mano a mano with a humanoid reptilian lizard on the Vasquez Rocks). But today, with productions traveling the globe chasing tax incentives and cheap labor, if a show goes to the trouble to film in Los Angeles, the city is likely to portray itself — a dynamic that is readily apparent with this year’s Emmy nominees, from the Pasadena-set Apple TV+ dramedy “Shrinking” to the ABC cop show “The Rookie,” which shoots across the City of Angels.
In Netflix’s “Nobody Wants This,” the unlikely romance between agnostic relationship podcaster Joanne (Kristen Bell) and progressive rabbi Noah (Adam Brody) plays out against a collection of topographically and culturally diverse backdrops ranging from funky, hipster-friendly neighborhoods like Eagle Rock (Noah’s House) and Silver Lake (vegetarian restaurant De Buena Planta) to the Pleasure Shop in West Hollywood, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple and the Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Koreatown, site of the show’s climactic bar mitzvah scene.
While these locations are oh-so-L.A. to locals, they probably don’t conform with the typical outsiders’ view of Hollywood. For that, there is Apple TV+’s “The Studio,” co-creator/star Seth Rogen’s manic, satirical comedy about desperately striving, status-obsessed showbiz execs. It hits many iconic Los Angeles locations, including the Warner Bros. Studios backlot in Burbank and the Beverly Hilton, Hollywood Roosevelt and Chateau Marmont Hotels, but for many the highlight is the architecture porn provided by a trio of mid-century modern hillside homes designed by John Lautner, most notably Silvertop, where they shot the (seemingly) one-take episode “The Oner.”
“Seth once said that he found that a lot of studio executives, they kind of collect things, and one of the things they like to collect are famous houses … houses with names,” says supervising location manager Stacey Brashear.
Silvertop came with several logistical challenges, not the least of which was the steep, narrow, winding roads leading to the house.
Fortunately, “they had a lovely tennis court that we were able to put all of our equipment on and store it out of the way, so that worked out really well,” notes Brashear. — Todd Longwell
When Jeffrey Bernstein, line producer for the Emmy-nominated Peacock series “Poker Face,” needed to locate an alligator farm and a corresponding swamp for the filming of its Season 2 episode “The Taste of Human Blood,” he discovered it in the most unlikely of locations: New York.
“I never thought of New York City having swamps with alligators,” says Bernstein. “But we found a great location at the Boy
Scout camp on Staten Island. We turned it into a North Central Florida gator reserve.”
The 143-acre William H. Pouch Scout Camp not only fit the “Poker Face” bill for that particular episode, but other Empire State locations have served as geographical doppelgangers for installments. One of Bernstein’s favorites: theHudson Valley.
“The Hudson Valley matches the rest of the country,” he notes. “On any particular episode, we were able to find a farmhouse, a quaint small town and match a Silicon Valley tech hub. It afforded us a lot of different looks.”
The second season of the Emmy-nominated Apple TV+ show “Severance” also relied on Hudson Valley locales like Kingston, Nyack, Beacon and Yonkers to sub for the fictional town of Kier, PE.
However, Ryan Smith, the program’s supervising location manager, admits the natural cave featured in the episode “Woe’s Hollow” was a happy accident that wasn’t initially in the script. Discovered by the children of a member of the scout team in the Peterskill area of Dieter Eagan National Forest, the cave is a tunnel that “you could film at one end and bring in equipment and cables from the other end.”
Smith says that after director Ben Stiller and the writers signed off on the location, the hard work began. “We needed special technical climbing permits to get to the cave, so we got special permission from the park and hired a team of alpinists, because we also had to show the studio that we could take the actors into a safe spot,” he recalls.
Smith, who also served as second unit director, says within a month of prep, the team of alpinists had run safety and guide lines and the location department set up stream lights throughout the park to accommodate sunrise load-ins andsunset load-outs.
“We were on snowcats transporting actors around and used military frame backpacks to strap in equipment and hand-carry everything in. Our entire truck fleet were put on tracks. It was almost a military operation.” — NK
The Highlands of Scotland, with its castles, deep, dark lochs, verdant glens and hills, and woods teeming with Macbethian lore, proved the ideal location for the hit murder-mystery reality competition series “The Traitors.” Even the host, Alan Cumming, is on theme, as he is a Scotsman.
Producer Mike Cotton says that the show is based on a Dutch format that took place in a medieval-looking castle, so for the U.S. and U.K. version, the team wanted something that evoked mystery — and murder.
The Emmy-winning series films in and around Ardross Castle, about 25 miles from the town of Inverness but not close to a major metropolitan area like Edinburgh or Glasgow. “We were looking for somewhere that had its own environment and its own feeling,” says Cotton. “I think when we came across Ardross Castle, we thought we’d found our perfect place. It’s remote. You feel isolated. Someone could get murdered there and it looks like a Disney castle, but it’s also got a slightly sinister, Gothic edge.”
The interior also worked well for the series’ trademark giant roundtable, and was able to accommodate the large cast. “The castle itself sits on a huge estate of 200 acres, which has a river running through it, it has hills, and has its own church within the grounds,” says Cotton. “It comes with its own ready-made playground.”
The show is crewed by a mix of people from all over the U.K. “We’ve got a Scottish office in Glasgow, so we’ve grown our Scottish talent base there, and we sort of add to that each year,” says Cotton. “We work with loads of local businesses on the show and even go to local schools and talk to all the kids there about how you get into making television programs.”
Another hurdle is building the challenges: “There’s an amazing team of local carpenters, builders, set designers, that build all these huge constructions, whether that’s a giant traitor or an enormous catapult or a creepy cabin,” he says.
With Season 4 in production, the team has smoothed out some major challenges. “We’re in a remote [location]. The castle doesn’t have a traditional infrastructure of a soundstage, so we have an amazing production team here — we build almost like a village within the castle grounds.” — CH
Much has been written about “The White Lotus” effect, the bump in tourism experienced by the resorts in Wailea, Hawaii, and Taormina, Italy, which served as the settings for Seasons 1 and 2 of the HBO series, respectively. But people looking to re-create the visitor experience depicted in Season 3, presumably minus the lies, intrigue, betrayal and murder, will have to do some island hopping after they arrive in Thailand.
The practical locations used to portray the Thai outpost of the titular fictional resort chain, as well as many of the of the other settings, were spread across two islands, Koh Samu and Phuket. On the former, they shot at the Four Seasons Resort (lobby, entrance, and jewelry store) and the Anantara Bophut Koh Samui Resort (bar lounge and pool suites). On the latter, they used Anantara Mai Khao Phuket Villas (spa and wellness sanctuary) and the Rosewood Phuket (dinner scenes). The show also traveled to Bangkok for many locations, including the Mandarin Oriental’s Bamboo Bar, where Frank (Sam Rothwell) makes his shocking confession to Rick (Walton Goggins).
Another HBO show, “Hacks,” made a less-ballyhooed use of a Southeast Asian location. In the climactic episode 10 of Season 4, titled “Heaven,” Las Vegas-based comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) travels to Singapore to escape her troubles and the restrictions of a non-compete clause, accompanied by her writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder). Arriving at the Jewel Changi Airport, they encounter the Rain Vortex, the world’s tallest indoor waterfall, and the episode goes on to highlight other visually dazzling spots around the city, including the Gardens by the Bay, the 163-year-old Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall, the Resorts World Sentosa’s casino and Ocean restaurant and the Fullerton Bay Hotel.
“There’s a connection between the adult theme park of Singapore and the adult theme park of Las Vegas,” observes “Hacks” DP Adam Bricker. “There’s something interesting about Deborah Vance needing to escape and getting to the flip side of the globe, and at the same time feeling very, very familiar.”
One of the most visually stunning locations almost didn’t make the cut: the Nova rooftop bar, where Deborah dances with drunken abandon, the lights of the Singapore cityscape spread out behind her.
“It was a last-minute add in our December scout, and then a very, very last-minute add to the actual shoot [in February 2025],” says Bricker. “The wide frame of her dancing alone is probably my favorite of the season, so I’m so glad that that worked out.” — TL
Here’s some food for thoughtfulness: When Casey Kriley and Jo Sharon of Magical Elves Prods. scouted Canadian restaurants to stage numerous culinary challenges for the Emmy-nominated 22nd season of Bravo’s “Top Chef,” subtitled “Destination Canada,” they tried to cause as little disruption for the host businesses as possible.
The entire shoot involving the 14 eateries was “often one day or even less” per episode.
“Sometimes it can even be a half a day,” Sharon says. “We try and work with restaurants in terms of their schedules. Obviously, they want to keep their restaurants open, which is as important to them as it is to us. Sometimes we’ll be starting at 7 a.m., so we can be out in time for dinner service.”
But there were some logistical challenges with some of the Toronto, Ontario and Calgary and Canmore, Alberta-based locations because of venue sizes.
“We’re pretty adaptable as a crew, but sometimes, if it’s a smaller restaurant and we can’t fit in all our cameras and chefs in terms of cooking stations, as well as the judges, we may not do our elimination challenge service in that restaurant,” says Kriley, whose team coordinated the locations with the assistance of Destination Canada, a Government of Canada-owned tourism marketing agency headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. “So, we’ll do what we call a ‘reality beat.’ Our chef may go and taste the food to be inspired for the challenge. Or they might learn something from the head chef at one of those restaurants. If we can’t achieve getting our whole crew in for an elimination service and challenge, we’ll pursue those locations in different ways.”
With gastronomic bases ranging from castles and ranches to warehouses and open spaces, all the businesses found themselves boosted by the on-air exposure generated by “Top Chef.”
“Last September, we got to host ‘Top Chef USA’ for their pizza challenge and it was a huge moment for us at Ravine Vineyard,” says John Vetere, executive chef and director of Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Estate Winery. “Having the show here put our restaurant and pizza program on the map in a way we couldn’t have done on our own. People from all over were coming in, fired up to try the pizzas they saw on TV. Our wines got some serious love, too. Fast forward to 2025: It ended up being our biggest year ever. Sales blew past what we were expecting.” — Nick Krewen
“Slow Horses” exec producer Doug Urbanski knows London locations, knows spy thrillers and knew what the Apple TV+ series needed to look like — and it wasn’t Sunday night British TV.
Urbanski, whose credits include “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “The Darkest Hour,” explains that while he’s a huge fan of British television, “Slow Horses” needed to look “more international.”
Based on the spy thrillers by Mick Herron, the series focuses on rumpled MI5 agent Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his misfit spy team. Season 5 is set for a Sept. 24 debut, and they are currently in post on Season 6.
The series showcases the workaday London, the grit, an anonymous little Chinese restaurant and, famously, Slough House, the rather Dickensian brick building that Lamb’s team works out of near London’s Barbican area, which stands in stark contrast to the steel and glass palace occupied by the bureaucratic strivers overseen by the chillingly efficient Diana Tavener (Kristin Scott Thomas).
Urbanski explains, “If you look at our exterior locations they’re sort of an ode to that question, ‘What kind of concrete were the English people using in the ’70s that was gonna look so awful now?’” Indeed, the series even spotlights the crumbling blocks of flats that some of the characters live in.
“So instead of close-ups of rats crawling along the top of houses of Parliament or garbage trucks, we did want to have the grittiness somehow but that stood apart. And the second we start to feel that we’re showing something that feels generic or familiar, we have a conversation about it, and we’ll immediately pull away and say, ‘No, it’s got to look a little bit more like this.’ We’re very attentive to that stuff.”
Urbanski says that “England is, for the most part, pretty good about giving you stuff — you have to pay, but they’re good.” Occasionally, they run into problems, like when they were trying to secure permission to shoot at one location from three different London borough councils, or the fact that the Regent’s Park canal used as a meeting point for Lamb and Tavener in several scenes of the last four seasons had no nearby bathrooms.
The series has had Lamb and Tavener doing a bit of spy business on the Duke of York steps adjacent to Buckingham Palace — yeah, it’s a tourist spot, but, Urbanski says, “we need those sort of set pieces, because what is better than two spies passing a file in public by the Duke of York steps?” — Carole Horst
In the ’60s and ’70s, when Los Angeles was the unrivaled central hub of television production, the city and its surrounding environs were called on to stand in for any and all locales, from Korea (“MASH,” shot in what is now Malibu State Creek Park) to the home planet of the Gorn (“Arena,” a 1967 episode of “Star Trek” where Captain Kirk goes mano a mano with a humanoid reptilian lizard on the Vasquez Rocks). But today, with productions traveling the globe chasing tax incentives and cheap labor, if a show goes to the trouble to film in Los Angeles, the city is likely to portray itself — a dynamic that is readily apparent with this year’s Emmy nominees, from the Pasadena-set Apple TV+ dramedy “Shrinking” to the ABC cop show “The Rookie,” which shoots across the City of Angels.
In Netflix’s “Nobody Wants This,” the unlikely romance between agnostic relationship podcaster Joanne (Kristen Bell) and progressive rabbi Noah (Adam Brody) plays out against a collection of topographically and culturally diverse backdrops ranging from funky, hipster-friendly neighborhoods like Eagle Rock (Noah’s House) and Silver Lake (vegetarian restaurant De Buena Planta) to the Pleasure Shop in West Hollywood, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple and the Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Koreatown, site of the show’s climactic bar mitzvah scene.
While these locations are oh-so-L.A. to locals, they probably don’t conform with the typical outsiders’ view of Hollywood. For that, there is Apple TV+’s “The Studio,” co-creator/star Seth Rogen’s manic, satirical comedy about desperately striving, status-obsessed showbiz execs. It hits many iconic Los Angeles locations, including the Warner Bros. Studios backlot in Burbank and the Beverly Hilton, Hollywood Roosevelt and Chateau Marmont Hotels, but for many the highlight is the architecture porn provided by a trio of mid-century modern hillside homes designed by John Lautner, most notably Silvertop, where they shot the (seemingly) one-take episode “The Oner.”
“Seth once said that he found that a lot of studio executives, they kind of collect things, and one of the things they like to collect are famous houses … houses with names,” says supervising location manager Stacey Brashear.
Silvertop came with several logistical challenges, not the least of which was the steep, narrow, winding roads leading to the house.
Fortunately, “they had a lovely tennis court that we were able to put all of our equipment on and store it out of the way, so that worked out really well,” notes Brashear. — Todd Longwell
When Jeffrey Bernstein, line producer for the Emmy-nominated Peacock series “Poker Face,” needed to locate an alligator farm and a corresponding swamp for the filming of its Season 2 episode “The Taste of Human Blood,” he discovered it in the most unlikely of locations: New York.
“I never thought of New York City having swamps with alligators,” says Bernstein. “But we found a great location at the Boy
Scout camp on Staten Island. We turned it into a North Central Florida gator reserve.”
The 143-acre William H. Pouch Scout Camp not only fit the “Poker Face” bill for that particular episode, but other Empire State locations have served as geographical doppelgangers for installments. One of Bernstein’s favorites: theHudson Valley.
“The Hudson Valley matches the rest of the country,” he notes. “On any particular episode, we were able to find a farmhouse, a quaint small town and match a Silicon Valley tech hub. It afforded us a lot of different looks.”
The second season of the Emmy-nominated Apple TV+ show “Severance” also relied on Hudson Valley locales like Kingston, Nyack, Beacon and Yonkers to sub for the fictional town of Kier, PE.
However, Ryan Smith, the program’s supervising location manager, admits the natural cave featured in the episode “Woe’s Hollow” was a happy accident that wasn’t initially in the script. Discovered by the children of a member of the scout team in the Peterskill area of Dieter Eagan National Forest, the cave is a tunnel that “you could film at one end and bring in equipment and cables from the other end.”
Smith says that after director Ben Stiller and the writers signed off on the location, the hard work began. “We needed special technical climbing permits to get to the cave, so we got special permission from the park and hired a team of alpinists, because we also had to show the studio that we could take the actors into a safe spot,” he recalls.
Smith, who also served as second unit director, says within a month of prep, the team of alpinists had run safety and guide lines and the location department set up stream lights throughout the park to accommodate sunrise load-ins andsunset load-outs.
“We were on snowcats transporting actors around and used military frame backpacks to strap in equipment and hand-carry everything in. Our entire truck fleet were put on tracks. It was almost a military operation.” — NK
The Highlands of Scotland, with its castles, deep, dark lochs, verdant glens and hills, and woods teeming with Macbethian lore, proved the ideal location for the hit murder-mystery reality competition series “The Traitors.” Even the host, Alan Cumming, is on theme, as he is a Scotsman.
Producer Mike Cotton says that the show is based on a Dutch format that took place in a medieval-looking castle, so for the U.S. and U.K. version, the team wanted something that evoked mystery — and murder.
The Emmy-winning series films in and around Ardross Castle, about 25 miles from the town of Inverness but not close to a major metropolitan area like Edinburgh or Glasgow. “We were looking for somewhere that had its own environment and its own feeling,” says Cotton. “I think when we came across Ardross Castle, we thought we’d found our perfect place. It’s remote. You feel isolated. Someone could get murdered there and it looks like a Disney castle, but it’s also got a slightly sinister, Gothic edge.”
The interior also worked well for the series’ trademark giant roundtable, and was able to accommodate the large cast. “The castle itself sits on a huge estate of 200 acres, which has a river running through it, it has hills, and has its own church within the grounds,” says Cotton. “It comes with its own ready-made playground.”
The show is crewed by a mix of people from all over the U.K. “We’ve got a Scottish office in Glasgow, so we’ve grown our Scottish talent base there, and we sort of add to that each year,” says Cotton. “We work with loads of local businesses on the show and even go to local schools and talk to all the kids there about how you get into making television programs.”
Another hurdle is building the challenges: “There’s an amazing team of local carpenters, builders, set designers, that build all these huge constructions, whether that’s a giant traitor or an enormous catapult or a creepy cabin,” he says.
With Season 4 in production, the team has smoothed out some major challenges. “We’re in a remote [location]. The castle doesn’t have a traditional infrastructure of a soundstage, so we have an amazing production team here — we build almost like a village within the castle grounds.” — CH
Much has been written about “The White Lotus” effect, the bump in tourism experienced by the resorts in Wailea, Hawaii, and Taormina, Italy, which served as the settings for Seasons 1 and 2 of the HBO series, respectively. But people looking to re-create the visitor experience depicted in Season 3, presumably minus the lies, intrigue, betrayal and murder, will have to do some island hopping after they arrive in Thailand.
The practical locations used to portray the Thai outpost of the titular fictional resort chain, as well as many of the of the other settings, were spread across two islands, Koh Samu and Phuket. On the former, they shot at the Four Seasons Resort (lobby, entrance, and jewelry store) and the Anantara Bophut Koh Samui Resort (bar lounge and pool suites). On the latter, they used Anantara Mai Khao Phuket Villas (spa and wellness sanctuary) and the Rosewood Phuket (dinner scenes). The show also traveled to Bangkok for many locations, including the Mandarin Oriental’s Bamboo Bar, where Frank (Sam Rothwell) makes his shocking confession to Rick (Walton Goggins).
Another HBO show, “Hacks,” made a less-ballyhooed use of a Southeast Asian location. In the climactic episode 10 of Season 4, titled “Heaven,” Las Vegas-based comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) travels to Singapore to escape her troubles and the restrictions of a non-compete clause, accompanied by her writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder). Arriving at the Jewel Changi Airport, they encounter the Rain Vortex, the world’s tallest indoor waterfall, and the episode goes on to highlight other visually dazzling spots around the city, including the Gardens by the Bay, the 163-year-old Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall, the Resorts World Sentosa’s casino and Ocean restaurant and the Fullerton Bay Hotel.
“There’s a connection between the adult theme park of Singapore and the adult theme park of Las Vegas,” observes “Hacks” DP Adam Bricker. “There’s something interesting about Deborah Vance needing to escape and getting to the flip side of the globe, and at the same time feeling very, very familiar.”
One of the most visually stunning locations almost didn’t make the cut: the Nova rooftop bar, where Deborah dances with drunken abandon, the lights of the Singapore cityscape spread out behind her.
“It was a last-minute add in our December scout, and then a very, very last-minute add to the actual shoot [in February 2025],” says Bricker. “The wide frame of her dancing alone is probably my favorite of the season, so I’m so glad that that worked out.” — TL