Where is Jack Ryan season 1 filmed? One city stood in for half the map
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan hit Prime Video on August 31, 2018, with eight episodes that hop between Washington, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Nevada, Paris, and the French Alps. Producers went out of their way to promise real locations.
They did travel. They also spent a lot of time in Quebec.
Real-life locations
The bulk of season one was shot in Montreal, with all interiors at Grandé Studios there. Montreal doubled for Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Washington, Nevada, and the French Alps chase. Real location work amounted to three weeks in Morocco, four or five days in Paris, and four days in D.C. and Maryland.
What Montreal played
The most famous swap is the season finale foot chase through the D.C. Metro, which is not the D.C. Metro — filming restrictions pushed it into the Montreal subway. The Paris mosque interior is also Montreal. So is the alpine pursuit. The production's location team returned to exactly one Montreal site twice: a closed hospital.
Where the crew actually went
- Morocco — Marrakech stood in for Aden, Yemen. The Suleiman family compound is the Oumnass Kasbah, roughly 30 km outside Marrakech. The port at Essaouira played the Gulf of Aden.
- Paris — Belleville and the 20th arrondissement for Ali's business dealings and the episode three chase, with Les Invalides and the Eiffel Tower used as backdrops.
- Église Saint-Merry — the 16th-century Gothic church in the 4th arrondissement, used inside and out for the sarin attack in episode four.
- Washington, D.C. and Maryland — the Potomac Boat Club for Jack's rowing, plus the Jefferson Memorial, the CIA's Original Headquarters Building, Georgetown, and Holly Beach Farm in Annapolis for the Mueller birthday party.
How they kept track of it
Four directors, several units shooting simultaneously, and four location managers across three continents who had never met each other. Everything ran through production designer Ruth Ammon and a shared online workspace holding the schedules, budgets, scripts, and scouting photos.
"We treated this series as if it were a really long feature film, " producer Robert F. Phillips told the Location Managers Guild International in 2019.
For the record: the location managers reported the show finished on time and on budget. Four continents, and the accountants were happy. That's pretty much a miracle.