Where Is Alex Rider Filmed?
Season 1 of Guy Burt's "Alex Rider" debuted in 2020 and immediately attracted fans who loved this take on the "teenage James Bond" from author Anthony Horowitz' book series. Moreover, as The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Feinberg pointed out, it managed to succeed in places where its box-office counterpart, 2006's "Stormbreaker," had failed. For instance, unlike the film, Sony Pictures' streaming version on Amazon Prime actually managed to land an audience. Though its inaugural season contained, as some critics suggested, an overabundance of exposition leading up to its actual plot, it nonetheless garnered the ever-coveted renewal for Season 2, which debuted early in December of 2021 (via The Guardian).
Rider (Otto Farrant) truly is the teenage James Bond, right down to his very British location and upbringing. Of course, no spy thriller series would be complete without at least a little bit of globetrotting, and "Alex Rider" is no exception. In the show's first season, Rider embarks on a quest to unravel the secrets behind his uncle's mysterious death and finds himself at a private boarding school called Point Blanc, located somewhere in the French Alps. But to shoot the series, they didn't actually make it to France.
Alex Rider pulled a French Alps fake-out in Season 1
"Alex Rider" filmed a good portion of its Season 1 scenes in London, though, as HITC reports, only Coke Street in England's Whitechapel neighborhood is officially listed on the series' IMDb page. For those scenes that took place in the scenic and snowy abyss of the French Alps surrounding the Point Blanc school, the show traveled a great deal further than France — over fifteen hundred miles away from London, to be precise — to the Romanian town of Sinaia located at the foot of the Becegi Mountains (via HITC and Google Maps).
"Alex Rider" isn't the only production to have filmed in the picturesque Romanian countryside. The BBC's "Killing Eve," Neil Burger's "Voyagers," and Netflix's "A Christmas Prince: A Royal Baby," all made use of the country's climate and landscape (via The Location Guide), to say nothing of the litany of motion pictures that have shot there over the years, including Anthony Minghella's "Cold Mountain" (via Positive News Romania).
In Season 2, Alex Rider has us believing Bristol was London
When it came time to shoot Season 2, the show used Bristol, England as a proxy for London, and utilized a number of the city's landmarks and buildings to bring Rider's tumultuous word to life. Filming locations in Bristol included (but were by no means limited to) The University of Bristol campus, Castle Park, St Nicholas Market, UWE Bristol Business School, and "A Bond Warehouse in the Cumberland Basin," where they built the set for their MI6's mysterious division known as "The Department" (via Visit Bristol).
Prior to their COVID-19-prompted decision to move to Bristol, Ark Burlington Danes Academy in London served as Rider and his friend Tom's (Brennock O'Connor's) high school (via Latlog), but the show's producer Richard Burrell was undeterred by the necessary (if unanticipated) location move. "Relocating Alex Rider from London to Bristol was a decision born from COVID-19," he said, "but it proved to be a successful choice on every level. The range of locations that Bristol and the West Country gave us were amazing" (via kftv). This all seems perfectly in keeping with the vibe of the series. It is, after all, a show about a teenage spy. That the producers have been able to disguise one location for another, multiple times, should hardly come as a surprise.