Who’d have thought you could double parts of Bolton for 1920s Russia? Well that’s what the makers of Paramount+ mini-series, A Gentleman in Moscow, did. 

“It was quite uncanny because the exterior of Bolton Town Hall is not dissimilar in looks to the Bolshoi Theatre,” says Lis Steele, series producer. “We just had to do a little bit of CGI tweaking and it was like you were there in Russia.”

Location manager Gary Barnes agrees: “We didn’t need to do a lot of dressing because Moscow in that period was quite open, so it was more a case of taking things away. The fact the town hall was in a big open square really helped us. We just had to put fake snow down and manoeuvre the cranes and cherry pickers.”

It wasn’t just Bolton either: parts of Leeds, Halifax and Manchester all doubled for Moscow, including the Hotel Metropol Moscow where the central character, Count Alexander Rostov (Ewan McGregor), is held under house arrest during the Bolshevik Revolution. While Liverpool Town Hall was used as a stand-in for Paris in a flashback scene.

These cities in the North of England have been proving extremely popular as doubling locations in recent years. For example, Liverpool was used to portray Gotham City in Warner Bros. The Batman. Manchester has doubled for New York in several projects, including Morbius and The Crown. Leeds has even doubled for Russia on a separate occasion in the recent Marvel mini-series Secret Invasion.

“There are a goldmine of locations across these cities that can double for the west and east. The Victorian town halls are particularly great, and not just outside either,” enthuses Steele. “We filmed kitchen sequences inside Tatton Park in Knutsford (just south of Manchester, with a Tudor Hall and neo-classical mansion); Victoria Hall in Bolton was used as a basement servants quarters of the Metropol; Liverpool St George’s Hall for bedroom and concert scenes; and the inside of Leeds Town Hall was used for the Kremlin interior when the Count is sentenced.”

The British Film Commission proved hugely helpful to the production when searching for these locations, providing a folio of options and liaising with the UK screen agencies and film offices, as well as giving information on who best to contact and keeping in touch with the location scout on the ground. 

Filming in England also provided extensive support to A Gentleman in Moscow, by helping the production find locations, suppliers as well as crew from all experience levels for the shoot.

The relevant local councils also proved key. “We needed them onside, but fortunately they were very accommodating, while conscious that people still needed to work at these places, so allocating us time. It was like piecing together a jigsaw, but it all worked,” says Barnes.

Screen Yorkshire also proved very helpful for the shoot at Leeds Town Hall as it coincided with a fun fair outside, so they helped manage the timings and noise levels to ensure it was not disruptive. 

But to create the whole world of the Metropol Hotel where the majority of the action takes place, the production and location teams had a little more difficulty. They had originally planned to shoot at a studio in Prague, but by the time the project was greenlit, it was no longer available. 

“We then did some scouting around real hotels, but there wasn’t one that had the scale and period authenticity. Any that might have been appropriate would’ve required so much work that it just made sense to build it instead,” explains Steele.

So they turned to an ideal facility in Space Studios, Manchester, which was purpose built for high-end film, TV and advertising production and boasts 6 soundstages; half of which were taken over to build the impressive sets for A Gentleman in Moscow. 

“We created the vast hotel lobby, mezzanine and piazza, as well as two of the hotel suites, including an interconnecting corridor, and the Count’s attic and bedrooms in the studios, which worked perfectly as our filming and production base in a controlled environment,” says Steele.  

It was mostly local crew constructing these sets too. “They are fantastic up north. We really wanted to support the region we were filming in, but also the talent is so good up there, why wouldn’t you?,” adds Steele.

Sustainability was also high on the agenda of the production team, which includes Tom Harper at Popcorn Storm Pictures and Xavier Marchand at Moonriver Productions, the executive producers who originally developed the project. They created their own bespoke green policies, which all the crew and cast signed up to, including no paper call sheets or plastic bottles.

They were also keen to be proactive on diversity behind and in front of the camera, conscious not to fall into the trap of saying: ‘Well how diverse would that period in history have been?’. Instead “we did colour-blind casting, just picking the best actors for the roles, and it was the same for the crew too,” says Steele.

The production also accessed the national tax incentive, “which was hugely important, and a straightforward process in terms of applying and getting the money back,” says Steele.

Despite filming being halted by the strikes, the team did manage to resume the shoot in early 2024, helped by some of the sets being kept in place at the studios while they were on hiatus.

“Everything worked out really well and we would love to have returned to the locations to shoot more, but it’s a one-off mini-series,” laughs Steele. 

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