‘Leave the World Behind’ Filming Locations: Where Was the Julia Roberts Netflix Movie Filmed?

Leave the World Behind, which is now streaming on Netflix, posits the question: What if, when the apocalypse comes and society collapses, you were stuck on Long Island?

That’s what happens to Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali, who star in this new psychological thriller written and directed by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail. The film is adapted from the critically acclaimed 2020 novel of the same name by Rumaan Alam, about a white family who rents a house on Long Island for a vacation, and receive a surprise visit from the house’s Black owner following a mysterious black-out in New York City.

It’s a Long Island story, to be sure, but Hollywood has been known to pull a few tricks in its day. So where was Leave the World Behind actually filmed? Read on to get all the info on the Leave the World Behind filming locations.

Where was Leave the World Behind filmed?

Leave The World Behind was filmed on location, on Long Island and the surrounding area in New York State. For the rental house where our heroes spend most of their screen time, scenes were filmed in a few different locations. The interiors were shot at a home found in Old Westbury, NewYork, as well as on a soundstage in Bethpage, New York, where near one-to-one replicas of the house’s rooms were built. (The soundstage replicas were used to capture some of those complicated tracking shots where the camera flips upside down.)

According to the official Leave the World Behind production notes, Esmail’s criteria for finding the perfect house were: 1) It needed to have an open kitchen and living room space because so much happens in those two spaces, and 2) the pool needed to be visible from the kitchen. The house that production found ultimately ended up being a modern farmhouse designed in 2019, by an architectural firm known as The Up Studio, which wrote up a blog post about the Leave the World Behind house on its website. You can also find a virtual tour of the home on the website.

Other scenes in the film were shot in Katonah, New York, a hamlet in Westchester County, near the Goldens Bridge, according to a report form Lohud. That first scene on the beach, where an oil tanker is grounded, was filmed at Sunken Meadow State Park in Smithtown, New York, along the Long Island Sound, according to The Daily Mail.

So there you have it. Long Island looks beautiful, even in the middle of the apocalypse!