Style & Culture

Where was ‘Succession’ filmed?

This mesmerising media satire is one of the best shows on TV right now – these are all the key filming locations to look out for across all the seasons
Succession season 2
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With the announcement that it will be the last, the prospect of Succession’s season four becomes even more intriguing. Over just 10 more episodes, that tantalising prospect in the show’s title must finally be resolved: who will triumph in this titanic family struggle and take on leadership of Waystar Royco?

Giving us a magnificent array of irredeemably awful characters, immaculately written and beautifully played, Jesse Armstrong’s show has been one of television’s greatest pleasures, and it’s also offered some of the best money-no-object locations from around the world. While we prepare for this Battle Roy-ale, here’s a tour of the highlights from seasons one to three and a taste of what’s coming in season four. As always with Succession, expect the views to be beautiful and the behaviour to be very ugly indeed.

  • Atlantic Ocean Road Norway
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    Season four

    As the Roys regather after their Italian showdown at the end of season three, we find them back in New York. We see all four gather at Peter McManus Café, an Irish bar on Seventh Avenue that claims it’s the oldest in the city, before heading out for karaoke. They also dine at Jean-Georges in Trump Tower, while Tom visits the Mark Hotel on 77th Street.

    The production also enjoys a stint on the West Coast, where the star location is a spectacular property in the Pacific Palisades in Santa Monica. A mansion on San Onofre Drive, just at the edge of the mountains and the State Park, takes in six bedrooms, including a master with a roof that opens to the stars, indoor and outdoor ‘Zen gardens’, a rooftop deck with pool and a 20-seat cinema. Built by property developer Ardie Tavangarian, it’s available to let – though be warned; it was estimated to be the second most expensive house in California in 2021.

    The big news for season four is a trip to Norway, home to Lukas Matsson. The tech mogul gives the Roys a tour of his part of the country, including several locations on the west coast. As producer Scott Ferguson told Variety, the opportunity was too good to turn down: “Norway is a glorious, natural setting. It immediately seemed like a perfect place for a family gathering in the series. We studied different countries, but we realised Norway just has this exceptional landscape – like nowhere else in the world.”

    The locations here include some familiar: the extraordinary islet-hopping Atlantic Ocean Road, featured in Bond outing No Time To Die as the ultimate car-chase challenge, and the Juvet Landscape Hotel. This eco-resort outside the village of Valldal was seen in the sci-fi movie Ex Machina, and is made up of nine timber pods with floor-to-ceiling windows, along with a spa and converted barn dining room – the perfect home for a tech billionaire in 2023, in other words.

    There’s also a reunion afoot, with Roys meeting key Royco staff at the summit of Nesaksla mountain close to the town of Andalsnes. We see the Eggen Restaurant here, with its 360-degree views of the Romsdalshorn and Vengetindene mountains and the Rauma River, as well as the Romsdalen Gondola, a cable car that transports them the 708 metres from ground level. Filming also took place further south on Kjeragbolten, a mountain to the east of Stavanger famed for waterfalls and a suspended stone, where we find some rather energetic activities going on amid the negotiations and ever-present backstabbing.

    Season Four of ‘Succession’ can be seen from Monday 27 March 2023 on Sky Atlantic and NOWTV.

  • Season three

    After the explosive drawing of battle lines that ends season two, we find Kendall holed up in the apartment of his ex-wife Rava in New York. This expansive home is played by the five-bedroom Pavilion A of the famed Woolworth Building, at 2 Park Place in Tribeca. Opened in 1912, the neo-gothic early skyscraper was once the tallest building in the world, and remains one of the most expensive. Kendall also has a new home of his own, revealed in episode three, filmed on the 90th floor at 35 Hudson Yards, part of the newly redeveloped neighbourhood in Chelsea that also featured in series The Flight Attendant. We’re back here in episode seven for Kendall’s 40th birthday in episode seven, filmed in the development’s arts venue The Shed after it was given a makeover that includes a treehouse and an abstract expression of his mother’s birthing canal.

    While Kendall is in New York, Logan retreats to Sarajevo, where he bunkers down in the Hotel Clio. This was in fact filmed in Ellenville, a town in upstate New York, at the Honor’s Haven Retreat & Conference. Similar trickery is employed for Episode six’s visit to Richmond, Virginia and the Future Freedom Summit, where the Roys meet a pair of presidential hopefuls. For the location of the summit, the production filmed the exterior of the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond but shot the interiors back in New York, at The Plaza on Fifth Avenue. This venerable hotel provided its Palm Court, Terrace Room and Grand Ballroom, previously seen in various combinations in classics such as Funny Girl, North by Northwest, Arthur and Sleepless in Seattle.

    Another of the city’s great hotels, the New York Marriott Marquis on Broadway, is the venue for episode five’s Waystar RoyCo shareholder meeting, while also featured in the season are The Pierre, A Taj Hotel, New York on East 61st Street, the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel on West 53rd, and the Mandarin Oriental on Columbus Circle. Another notable New York location is the Cooper Union Foundation Building in NoHo, a brownstone from the 1850s housing a private college whose Great Hall is an established venue for speeches and art shows. It’s here that we see Cousin Greg meeting his grandfather Ewan in episode two.

    After season two’s unforgettable ‘boars on the floor’ sequence, there’s also a return to the Hamptons. This time, it’s Logan and Roman alone, travelling separately in episode four to the island mansion of shareholder Josh Aaronson (Adrien Brody). His glass-walled waterfront property is in fact a private home in Wainscott, carefully shot to hide the neighbouring houses, while the surrounding area was filmed in nearby Montauk and the beaches of Shadmoor State Park and Kirk Park.

    For the finale, season three goes one better than season two’s yacht trip with a Roy outing to Tuscany. British showrunner Armstrong admitted to Vulture that this was something of an in-joke for his countrymen: “I don’t know how much of a social signifier it is to Americans – anybody who can go abroad is really rich,” he said, "but [Tuscany] has this particular flavour
    for the English upper class. Some call it Chiantishire, in a slightly sickening way."

    However the region resonates, the shoot provides some spectacular views, filmed by the same Italian crew who worked on the House of Gucci. In the starring role is Villa Cetinale in the small town of Sovicille, a 17th-century building with 13 bedrooms, a private chapel and extensive gardens, which became the wedding venue. The Roys, meanwhile, are in residence at Villa La Foce near the spa town of Chianciano Terme, with Kendall at the five-bedroom (plus, as we see, a pool) Villa Bonriposi in Legoli. We also see Shiv and Tom touring the bathing pool in the spa village of Bagno Vignoni, a full complement of Roy siblings dining with their mother at La Terrazza Del Chiostro in Pienza, and Shiv at her mother’s bachelorette party in the medieval town of Cortona.

    Rivalling even Tuscany for beauty is another Italian location: the holiday home of GoJo’s Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard), which Roman visits on a whistlestop diversion in episode eight. Though we’re led to believe this is overlooking Lake Maggiore, it is in fact Villa La Casssinella on Lake Como. With a main villa, pool house with cinema and gym, formal gardens and an astonishing view, it’s only right that Matsson declares himself bored of it.

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    Season two

    The show’s second season rings some changes, with a greater number of locations used, especially outside New York. Before then, though, we’re introduced to a new home in Manhattan for Shiv and Tom, filmed in an unspecified penthouse overlooking Brooklyn Bridge, and we see Kendall in Del Posto on 10th Avenue, the most lavish of NYC’s Italian restaurants.

    In episode two, the family celebrate a child’s birthday at one of the company’s adventure parks, Brightstar – in fact, Six Flags Great Escape in Queensbury, upstate New York, the same location where in Season One we see Cousin Greg vomiting into his chicken costume. In episode six, we’re nearby at Whiteface Lodge, Lake Placid, a palatial timber resort in the Adirondacks that serves as the setting for the Argestes media conference.

    Before that, episode one gives us a move reminiscent of season one’s family trip to the New Mexico ranch of eldest brother Connor, when we’re taken to a summit in Logan’s new house in the Hamptons, where a highly symbolic raccoon is causing a stink in the chimney. This is really the Henry Ford Estate at Jule Pond, in Mecox Bay, Southampton, built by Henry Ford II in 1960 and, with 42 acres and the largest ocean frontage in the region, recently valued at $175 million. Later, in episode five, the Roys visit business rivals the Pierces at another mansion, filmed at Salutation Manor in Glen Cove, on the north shore of Long Island. Situated on its own 48-acre island, this was built by a grandson of financier JP Morgan in 1919 and, with its long gallery corridors and formal drawing rooms, very much looks like it.

    One of the season’s most gruelling scenes comes in episode three at the company retreat in Hungary, after a day shooting, drinking and plotting. Despite the ambience of old European royal residence, this was in fact shot close to Salutation Manor, at Oheka Castle in Huntington. Built (and named after) financier Otto Hermann Kahn in the 1910s, it’s a 127-roomed fairytale castle in the French style, down to the perfectly symmetrical sunken garden, used in photographic form as Kane’s Xanadu in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and now a hotel.

    There’s also a return to the UK, this time to Logan’s hometown of Dundee, where he’s honoured at the new space-age riverside V&A Museum, and also Glasgow, where filming took place around George Square, and also doubled for scenes set in London. While there, the production took the opportunity to fly to Iceland for the season’s opening shots of Kendall in a rehab centre. According to producer/director Mark Mylod, this had originally been set at the Blue Lagoon spa close to Reykjavik but was hurriedly relocated after contractual difficulties. “With about a week to go, we were locationless, which was a little bit scary,” he told Filmmaker Magazine. “I’d been a big fan of Black Mirror and remembered a house I’d seen on an episode [season four’s Crocodile], which I knew was in Iceland. It happened to be available, and we jumped all over that. It was a fantastically stark location.”

    In sharp contrast, the season ends with the Roys amid blue skies and seas in the Aegean Sea and Croatia. This was filmed on the island of Korcula, both on the 279-foot charter yacht Solandge and in the Old Town, taking in the 15th-century St Mark’s Cathedral and shoreside restaurant Cupido.

  • Getty Images

    Season one

    The base for both the show and the Roy family at its centre is New York City. At its heart are two locations, patriarch Logan’s house on Fifth Avenue and the head office of his Waystar Royco empire. The home, a high-ceilinged Billionaire’s Row townhouse straight out of the Gilded Age, is created mostly in a studio. When we see the lobby, though, it’s really the entrance to the American Irish Historical Society, which is indeed on Fifth Avenue, overlooking the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Central Park. The offices, meanwhile, are recreated in two empty areas in the World Trade Center, in blocks 4 and 7, giving the authentic top-of-the-world views over Midtown Manhattan.

    Season one also shows us a variety of other NYC spots, from the company gala held in the Cunard Building on Broadway in episode four to the East New York Freight Tunnel, a graffiti-heavy section of unused railroad track that provides the entrance to the elite event visited for the bachelor party of Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) in episode eight. We also see the Downtown Manhattan Heliport at Pier 6, where the family choppers out in the first episode for a high-stakes game of rounders starring rogue son Roman (Kieran Culkin), and the Bellevue Hospital, the revered institution on First Avenue where Logan is taken when he suffers a stroke.

    For the final two episodes, the show moves to the UK for Shiv’s wedding. This takes place at the home of her English mother, Lady Caroline (Harriet Walter), filmed at Eastnor Castle in
    Herefordshire, a fantastical faux-medieval construction from the 19th century that has featured on film and TV for 50 years, including the BBC’s children’s classic The Box of Delights and Madonna’s reviled biopic of Wallace Simpson, W.E. (2012).

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