Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) and Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan) cover a lot of ground throughout The Night Agent. The series follows FBI agent Peter and tech entrepreneur Rose as they untangle conspiracies that threaten the White House and America at large. Their adventures take them from Washington, DC, all the way to Thailand. While some scenes really were filmed on location (yes, that really is Basso running through the streets of Bangkok), other times, The Night Agent taps into some TV-making magic.
For example, many of the DC-set moments in Season 1 were actually shot in British Columbia, Canada, with Vancouver standing in for the US capital city. Keep reading for all the intel on The Night Agent’s key locations.
The Night Agent Season 2 kicks off with Peter working as a Night Agent in Thailand with his mentor, Alice (Brittany Snow). Series creator Shawn Ryan originally considered starting the new season in Bucharest, Romania. “Then I learned what the weather was like in January,” he says. Line producer Paul F. Bernard recommended Thailand instead, and Ryan was immediately “intrigued” by that locale, finding himself charmed by the historic structures and bustling atmosphere of its capital city.
“The action itself wasn’t necessarily dependent on being [in] a specific country,” he explains. “What I wanted was a feeling that Peter is not at home. Peter is out of his element — and is a stranger in a new land.”
Bangkok, which Ryan describes as “glorious,” offered The Night Agent an authentically far-from-home feeling for Peter. “I love just the look, especially at night, of these different neighborhoods and the vehicles that go by,” Ryan says. “These specific storefronts and the way that that city is so condensed. You go around one corner and there’s something completely different around another corner.”
Basso also appreciated that the humid weather made it easier to get into character. “It makes those moments when you have to ‘act’ out of breath and tired real. You’re not having to do jumping jacks off camera,” he says. “And you’re really sweating!”
Peter trades the balmy atmosphere of Bangkok for the concrete jungle of New York in the Season 2 premiere. As with the Night Agent’s Thailand scenes, those set in New York were shot on location. Ryan told Netflix that filming in the Big Apple allowed Season 2 to “make the scope of the show bigger.”
“We really were able to take advantage of filming in New York in a way that very few shows do. We’re out in the world and able to embrace it,” he told Netflix. “You could feel there’s nothing fake about it at all.”
The series begins with Peter thwarting a bombing on the DC Metro, saving nearly everyone on his train. While the subway scenes were filmed at a local studio, the exterior of the Metro, where Peter spots the suspect and immediately gives chase, begins in the downtown plaza of the Vancouver Art Gallery .
After Rose narrowly escapes the assassins who kill her aunt and uncle, she holes up in a hotel room guarded by Secret Service agents. That hotel, and the major chase scene and shootout that take place there, were filmed at a Vancouver JW Marriott.
The University of British Columbia stands in for Georgetown in most of the campus-set scenes with vice presidential daughter Maddie Redfield (Sarah Desjardins) and her Secret Service agents Chelsea Arrington (Fola Evans-Akingbola) and D.B. Woodside (Erik Monks), including the university’s chemistry building and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at the UBC Library. The library scenes were shot at St. James Anglican Church.
The bar where Maddie encounters a not-so-friendly classmate was filmed at the Gastown event space the Ironworks, which is home to a variety of events from film and TV shoots to arts classes. Fun fact: The venue served double duty — an upstairs studio stands in for the home of Maddie’s art teacher, Paulo (Greyston Holt), where Maddie is kidnapped.
Rose does some of her tech wizardry after setting up shop at a diner. Those scenes were filmed at an actual restaurant in Langley, British Columbia.
The remote cabin where Rose and Peter take refuge is actually located outside of Vancouver in the Coast Mountains, in a park named after the twin peaks known as the Golden Ears.
A public park much closer to the Vancouver city center served as the picturesque location of a key moment — when Peter comes to Rose’s rescue and confronts Dale (Phoenix Raei), one of the assassins chasing after the duo.
Another of Peter and Rose’s temporary safe houses is a boat belonging to his godfather, where Chelsea and Erik finally catch up to them. The marina where the boat docks was filmed in nearby Richmond — not to be confused with Virginia’s state capital, which is only 109 miles from Washington, DC.
The shipping container showdown — aka Maddie’s rescue — takes place in the logistics and storage company WTC Group’s Lindsey Terminal.
Re-creating the famous presidential retreat of Camp David was a massive undertaking for the Night Agent crew, and took place all over the Vancouver metro area. “It was a big, big production, so many moving parts,” Buchanan tells Tudum. Since the sequence unfolds across many locations within Camp David, it required five different Vancouver stand-ins that were rained out on multiple days thanks to British Columbia’s unpredictable weather. Not even the indoor locations were safe, says Basso: “They shot the interiors of the helicopter there, but it was raining and the seats were soaked because there were leaks in the helicopter.”
The final scene of the season, in which Peter bids Rose goodbye and boards a plane on his mission as an actual night agent, was shot at this small private airport near the Golden Ears mountains.
To re-live Peter’s globetrotting journey, rewatch The Night Agent right now. And, keep coming back to Tudum for more inside information on Peter’s next mission ahead of Season 3.
