The first long-term tenant of Liverpool’s pop-up studios is a streaming service, which is filming its newest drama, Sexy Beast.
The Depot has been engaged by Paramount+ for a seven-month shoot of the prequel to the same-titled Ray Winstone movie from 2000.
The Hollywood of the North’s two 20,000-square-foot (1,850-square-meter) studios first opened their doors in October last year.
Since then, the Edge Lane location has only been used to film television commercials.
According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, producers will also shoot in a number of urban settings that will serve as 1990s East London, including the gardens of St. Nicholas Church and Tower Gardens, Rumford Street, and Anfield.
James McArdle, who played in BBC Two’s Life After Life, is a cast member of the eight-part Paramount Plus series Sexy Beast, which follows the lives of small-time crooks who become involved in the London underworld.
The Depot has been a true game changer and embodies Liverpool’s long-held objectives to be a 24/7 film city, according to Councillor Harry Doyle, assistant mayor of Liverpool.
He claimed that the fact that Sexy Beast was filmed in the studios was evidence of the team’s ambition for the city’s film office.
The Depot was always about “future proofing” Liverpool’s leading position in the film and television sectors, said Lynn Saunders, director of the Liverpool Film Office.
She claimed that Sexy Beast would be the “first of many” films to shoot in Liverpool and that The Depot had “sealed the deal” on its arrival.
