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The premiere of Succession season 3 takes place this Sunday on HBO. We’ll be revealing the filming locations for Succession episode by episode. Also, catch up on all the fabulous filming locations of the first two seasons below. The drama is one of those shows that grows on you and suddenly hits you with a bang, making that binge session worth it. As we enter into the new season, the Roy family and its media company Waystar Royco are grappling with the fallout of Kendall Roy’s revelation in a press conference about wrongdoing in the cruise division. He pinned the blame on his father, Logan, the patriarch of the family. The new season also introduces a new character, Lukas Mattson, a tech founder and CEO played by Alexander Skarsgård.
The show certainly packs a lot of star power behind the scenes and in the cast. Succession is executive produced by Oscar-winner Adam McKay (The Big Short), Frank Rich (HBO’s “Veep”), Will Ferrell, Kevin Messick, Jane Tranter (HBO’s The Night Of) and Mark Mylod (HBO’s “Entourage”), and created by Oscar-winner Jesse Armstrong (In the Loop), who is also the series showrunner and an executive producer. The music is written by two-time Oscar nominee Nicholas Britell, who also composed the soundtrack to The Big Short and Moonlight.
The cast of Succession is led by Shakespearean actor Brian Cox, who plays Logan Roy. The parallels to the Murdoch family are impossible to miss, down to the “ATN Network,” clearly a stand-in for FOX News. In previous seasons, storylines drew on political upheaval in the United States. Other notable actors on the show include Kieran Culkin, who plays Logan’s waywardly youngest son Roman, Matthew Macfayden as Tom Wamsgams, fiancé then husband of Logan’s daughter Siobhan “Shiv” Roy, and Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy, Logan’s second son who appears to be the heir apparent of Waystar Royco at the opening of the second season. Up to now, Kendall has been the emotional heart of the show, whose characters often ply the border between satirical, horrifying, and oddly empathetic. But now that the cards are finally in Kendall’s hands, will we like what we see in him? Who will the rest of the Roy siblings fall behind: Kendall or Roy? Succession is not an easy watch, but it sweeps you in with excellent screenwriting and strong performances.
Succession films mostly in New York City (with forays to Washington D.C., Long Island, New Mexico, England and more foreign locations in season three), embodying the locales of the rich and powerful. Influence is the name of the game here, but Machiavelli and Shakespeare are ever-present.
It looks like downtown Manhattan is the name of the game for the opening of the third season, with Kendall Roy emerging from the privately-owned public space courtyard between the Four Seasons Private Residences, located at 30 Park Place, and the Woolworth Building. As you will see from the next filming location, he has made the apartment in the Woolworth Tower Residences that his ex-wife lives in the headquarters for his legal efforts.
The Four Seasons Private Residences stands taller than the Woolworth Building, dwarfing what was once the world’s tallest building located just east of it. The Four Seasons was previously featured as a filming location in Ray Donovan.
The Pinnacle Apartment within the Woolworth Tower Residences is where Kendall Roy is holing up. His wife and children live there, and we can make the assumption that he potentially lived there before the divorce. After all, the $22.5 million apartment has five bedrooms and four bathrooms, plus two powder rooms. There’s a 27,70o square foot duplex terrace (where you see Roman take a phone call), six skylights, and 22-foot ceilings. The most distinctive feature within the apartment is the spiral staircase that goes between floors. The entrance to the Woolworth Tower Residences is at 2 Park Place, around the corner from the formal entrance to the Woolworth Building, which still contains offices. Scenes also take place on the street just outside the apartment building as well as at the entrance.
The top brass at Waystar Royco, along with Logan, go to a private airport, which is filmed at Ross Aviation in Westchester. But they don’t know where they are going yet, awaiting direction from Logan, who is deciding which non-extradition country they should fly to. For the characters to get to and from the airport, there are several scenes in cars along the West Side Highway and the FDR Drive. The scenes when everyone is supposedly at Sarajevo are filmed in Italy.
Another popular private airport for the rich and powerful is Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, where scenes from The Flight Attendant were filmed. It is also where Jeffrey Epstein was arrested. In 2019, a WWII Spitfire airplane made a stop at Teterboro on a global tour.
Cousin Greg meets up with his grandfather (played by James Cromwell) at the rear entrance of the Foundation Building at Cooper Union, the private college in the heart of Manhattan’s East Village. Its Great Hall is where Abraham Lincoln spoke in 1860 and has become a speechmaking locale for America’s Presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Woodrow Wilson.
Greg’s grandfather agrees to help him get legal representation in the contested Roy family battle for power, in which Greg’s role has been a linchpin. They sit in Cooper Triangle, a small park at 7th Street and Cooper Square.
Logan Roy and his third wife Marcia “Marcy” Roy live in a sprawling Fifth Avenue townhouse. The lobby of the townhouse is filmed in the American Irish Historical Society at 991 Fifth Avenue located across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The upper floors of the townhouse are created on a soundstage at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City. Production designer Stephen Carter tells Architectural Digest that he was inspired by the homes of Edgar Bronfman and Charles Bronfman, who had townhouses on the same section of Fifth Avenue as Logan Roy’s is. There is a real vintage elevator in the American Irish Historical Society, so the set recreates this interior experience.
The upper floors of the American Irish Historical Society do not appear in the show but are quite stunning. According to Christopher Cahill, a poet and the director of the AIHS, the main floors of the townhouse are one of the “least altered interiors,” still extant from a 1911 renovation by the architect Ogden Codman, Jr. known for co-authoring Edith Wharton’s first book, The Decoration of Houses. In 2020, it was announced that the American Irish Historical Society would be putting the townhouse on sale for a record $52 million.
The Waystar Royco offices are filmed at the World Trade Center in both 4 WTC and 7 WTC, where you can see Manhattan skyline views of Tribeca, Midtown, and Lower Manhattan but also on a soundstage. When a television studio set is needed, the production uses the studio of SNY, the online sports channel, headquartered in 4 WTC.
In season two, you see Kendall arrive by motorcycle to the street in front of 28 Liberty Street, across from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This building has been appearing a lot recently in television shows including Billions and Iron Fist. Set decorator George DeTitta, Jr. told Architectural Digest that he took cues from the Murdoch offices: “I looked online at the Murdoch media offices for inspiration and went for a more clean, modern approach.” Season three continues to situate the Waystar office at 28 Liberty Street.
When Logan impromptu proposes that “it’s time to play the game” at his 80th birthday lunch, we soon see that it involves taking several helicopters from the Downtown Manhattan Heliport located on the East River near Wall Street. The heliport services several helicopter companies as well as government helicopters. [We recently took a Marine Osprey helicopter from the downtown Manhattan Heliport during Fleet Week to visit the USS New York.] You may also recognize the heliport from the movie Wolf of Wall Street.
When Logan suffers a stroke on the helicopter ride back from the family estate, he is whisked to Bellevue Hospital. The hospital on Manhattan’s East Side also recently was a shooting location for the NBC medical drama New Amsterdam. He clearly gets a pretty swanky suite at the hospital, which may be a set, but the scenes where the siblings talk in an amphitheater are located in Bellevue Hospital, and you see some scenes just outside the hospital on the street.
Logan Roy is honored at Waystar Royco’s annual company gala in the Cunard Building, the former shipping company-turned-banquet hall on Broadway in Lower Manhattan. The Cunard Building was designed by the architect Benjamin Wistar Morris along with the architectural firm Carrere & Hastings. Morris worked with muralist Ezra Winter to create a decor plan that focused on marine and shipping themes for the building. The building’s lobby served as the business’s ticketing hall, which was 183 feet long with a 68-foot dome, until 1968.
The ticketing hall is now owned by Cipriani S.A. as an event space and has been featured in many television shows including Gotham and The Blacklist. Though the Cunard building is rarely open to the public, except for private events, Untapped Cities partnered with the show D.S. Destiny to offer access inside the ticketing hall last year.
Kendall, Roman, Frank Vernon (Logan’s long time friend and board member of Waystar Royco), and Waystar legal counsel Gerri meet at the Chelsea Square Diner located at 368 W. 23rd Street at the intersection of 9th Avenue to plot out the final moves in the planned no-confidence vote against Logan. Gerri mentions that she feels sure nobody will recognize them in the diner, which proves true, but things don’t go as planned afterward.
On the way to Washington D.C. (we assume she’s taking Amtrak and will get out at Union Station), Shiv calls Tom from the new Penn Station entrance in the Farley Post Office building across from Madison Square Garden. It leads to the West End concourse, a generally more pleasant way to get onto the Long Island Rail Road than the normal entrances to Penn Station.
If you’re a transit fan, join us for an upcoming tour of the Remnants of Penn Station where you’ll see what’s left of the original, grand station that once stood here:
Tour of the Remnants of Penn Station
Tom Wamsgams has, for some reason, selected Roman Roy to plan his bachelor party. You never know where Roman’s loyalty really lies, but like the rest of the Roy children, getting on Logan’s good side tends to trump everything else. So, instead of going to Prague, he jumps at an opportunity offered by Stewy, Kendall’s financier friend who gets on the board of Waystar Royco during the first season. Stewy says that Sandy Furness attends the underground Rhomboid parties, and Furness controls 50 local television stations that Logan wants to acquire. Stewy plants the seed that Roman could help enable Logan’s “dream deal,” and with that, the bachelor party gets moved to the upcoming Rhomboid party.
The bachelor party shows up at a railroad track and walks into a tunnel. This is filmed at the abandoned East New York Freight Tunnel (the actual party is filmed in a warehouse in Sunset Park, Brooklyn). Though built for freight, it was part of a route by the Pennsylvania railroad to connect New Jersey to the northeast going from Bay Ridge to New England, there was also passenger train activity and a station here. Today, this is evidenced by an abandoned platform that once was part of the New York and Manhattan Beach Railway, a line that went from Long Island City and Bay Ridge to the luxury resorts on Manhattan Beach. This is a pretty great filming location that we haven’t seen in previous shows and demonstrates that the film scouts know New York City very well!
Shiv and Tom get married (not without the characteristic cringes, awkwardness, and tragedy that comes with anything connected to the Roy family) in England, an attempt by Shiv to placate her mother who lives and is from the country. They are married in what is purported to be her mother’s family’s estate, and the wedding is shot at Eastnor Castle, a medieval castle in Herefordshire that was actually built in the early 1800s. It has appeared in many television shows and films over the years for period dramas, as well as for more modern-day uses as an off-roading test track for Land Rovers and in an episode of The Amazing Race.
Following the aftermath of Shiv’s wedding, Kendall’s accident, and his failed takeover of Waystar Royco, Logan calls for another family summit. This time, they are at what appears to be a new acquisition, or at least, a new renovation: a mansion in the Hamptons. This real-life 42-acre estate, originally built for the Ford family is known as Jule Pond, located on Mecox Bay in Southampton.
Currently for sale, it was originally listed in 2017 for $175 million and recently dropped to $145 million. It is said to have the “largest ocean frontage” in all of the Hamptons and was originally an astounding 235-acre property called “Fordune.” Like other Gilded Age mansions in America, much of the interiors were shipped over from Europe’s chateaux and castles.
Kendall goes in Logan’s stead to meet Stewey and Sandy Furness. If viewers recall, Kendall was working with Stewey and Sandy to take over Waystar until his accident. Kendall goes to the downstairs room of Del Posto at 85 Tenth Avenue.
Stewey, a long-time friend of Kendall, knows more is going on. Kendall sticks to the line fed by his father, and Stewey gets increasingly angry. Kendall then delivers a very dramatic picture of what will happen next to Sandy and the team if they move forward. This location was also seen in Billions.
The office of Vaulter, which Kendall is about to gut on behalf of his father, is located at One Hudson Square (aka 75 Varick Street). In Tribeca, just off Canal Street near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, this building (and the neighborhood) is home to many real media and advertising companies including Horizon Media, Edelman, and more. This makes the film location pretty fitting for the fictional Vaulter company.
Incidentally, this office building is just a stone’s throw from the apartment inhabited by Bobby Axelrod in Billions, located at 145 Hudson Street.
The annual corporate retreat for the board of Waystar Royco supposedly takes place in Hungary, but is actually filmed at Oheka Castle in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The Gilded Age mansion of Otto Kahn, now often used for weddings, the 127-room estate is the second-largest private house in the United States. During the heydays of the Gold Coast of Long Island during the 1920s, Kahn used the lavish estate to host extravagant parties and entertain royalty, heads of state, and Hollywood stars.
Next, check out the filming locations for Billions on Showtime.
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