New research this week revealed the most popular filming locations in Ireland - and it's no wonder directors and filmmakers flock here every year to grab a piece of the action and a lot of the scenery.
From the streets of Dublin and Galway to Donegal’s stunning coastline and the panoramic vistas of the west, Ireland has long been a dream for location scouts.
However, filmmakers don’t just come here for those picturesque locations and historical buildings.
There is also the all-important facts that Ireland can boast some of the best film crews and technicians on the planet, our burgeoning film industry, excellent studio facilities, and let’s not forget the obvious attractions of Section 481.
Since it was introduced in 2015, this scheme has offered a tax refund of up to 32% on TV and film productions made here, including cast, crew, visual effects and post-production, as well a 5% regional "uplift" for projects shooting outside the most popular filming locations of Dublin, Wicklow, and Cork.
Of course, most of the movies and tv shows made here tell innately Irish stories and in recent years we have gone from the sublime (An Cailín Ciúin) to the bad (Irish Wish) to the very bad (Wild Mountain Thyme).
But what about the times our splendid forests, and awe-inspiring mountains and coastlines have stood in for entirely different locations far removed from rom coms and historical dramas?
We’ve rounded up some famous and not so famous movies where Ireland has been far from typecast.
Drop
Only released this week, this tech-based thriller stars White Lotus actress Meghann Fahy and Brandon Skelnar of It Ends With Us as two hopeful lovebirds who go on the worst first date ever.
The film was shot in Dublin city centre and Ardmore Studios in Wicklow and we'd love to deploy cliches such as " . . . but Dublin is the real star here" etc but we can’t because unless you are a habitué of the city centre, more precisely Spencer Dock on North Wall Quay, you wouldn’t have a bog’s notion that Drop was made here.
The movie sees dear old Dublin stand in for Chicago, which is, of course, a very Irish city. Fahy’s character, Violet, rocks up to the Liffey-side Convention Centre and takes an elevator to a swanky top floor restaurant with panoramic views of a glittering skyline that could only be Dublin in Johnny Rohan’s wildest dreams.
Watch our interview with Drop stars Meghann Fahy and Brandon Skelnar
And just to be sure we are in the Windy City and not the windy northside Dublin quays, if you squint hard enough you can see a digitised version of Chicago’s landmark Sears Tower off in the distance in the closing scene of Drop.
Also - in a nice example of contextual continuity, First Dates Ireland is filmed just a few Luas stops from Spencer Dock and the two lead characters in Drop are on their FIRST DATE!!! Coincidence? Yes.
Cocaine Bear
The fragrant woodlands of Avoca and Powerscourt in Wicklow, and Barnaslingan in County Dublin provided most of the shooting locations for this 2023 bad taste romp about a Mama bear who goes loco when she swallows a consignment of class A drugs. Made by Dublin-based production company Wild Atlantic Pictures Ltd and starring Keri Russell and the late Ray Liotta, the movie is loosely inspired by the story of a wild ursid who reputedly ingested a large amount of lost cocaine that was dropped from a drug smuggler's airplane in the rural areas of Georgia in the US in the 1980s.
Watch our interview with Keri Russell
Cocaine Bear was shot in Ireland in 2021 and speaking to RTÉ Entertainment about making the film, Keri Russell said. "It was amazing because at that time Ireland's Covid numbers were really low. The forests we shot in Wicklow matched the southern states pretty well."
Space Truckers
In which the 22,000 acre vacant premises of a builders' merchant in the Sandyford Industrial Estate in leafy south Dublin stood in for the Neptunian moon Triton in the year 2196. No, really. This 1996 sci-fi action flick had a decent cast, including Dennis Hopper, Stephen Dorff, Olwen Fouéré, Charles Dance, and Norm from Cheers (who is also known as George Wendt). However, the story of space mercenaries, intergalactic pirates and rampaging cyborg warriors really shouldn't have made it past a low earth orbit. It was critically mauled but fiar play to Charles Dance, who said he accepted the role "for the sheer fun of it" and called it the most entertaining script he'd been offered in years.
Disenchanted
Wicklow is only second to Dublin when it comes to popular locations for movie makers and in 2021 the towns of Enniskerry and Greystones were transformed for the Disney movie Disenchanted.
This sequel to the 2007 fairytale rom com Enchanted, which was shot in Powerscourt, Luggala, Kilruddy House and Garden and Kiltegan, and it saw Hollywood stars Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey reprise their roles as princess Giselle and cynical divorce lawyer, Robert Phillip. Dempsey, Dr McDreamy himself, spent his time in Ireland wandering around in an Aran jumper and posting some very nice pictures of the Irish scenery on his Instagram account. Which was nice.
Saving Private Ryan
Who hasn't frolicked on the golden sands of Curracloe and Ballinesker in the fair county of Wexford at one time or another? However, nobody could have guessed both these beaches would one day be the locations for a Hollywood re-enactment of the biggest amphibious landing in history.
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Ireland played no small part in the real Normandy landings on 6 June 1944. As well as the Irish men who fought on the beaches, in the days before the invasion, the weather forecasts of Maureen Sweeney, a postmistress at Blacksod Point in Mayo, were sent to London and proved invaluable in deciding the actual date for the landings.
In 1997 director Steven Spielberg chose the beaches of Wexford for the stunning opening sequence of his celebrated World War Two epic Saving Private Ryan. It is perhaps his greatest achievement. Eight cameras were rolling and 1,500 extras took part, some of whom were members of the Irish Reserve Defence Forces.
Northern Ireland filmmaker Mark Huffam, who went on to work on Game of Thrones and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, was unit production manager and associate producer for the shoot and speaking to BBC NI last year to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, he said, "The brief from the get-go was: 'We want to make this look real',"
"We’re not out to glamorise war, we want it to look like what those soldiers and men really went through when they hit that beach."
Huffam also revealed that two of the amphibious landing vehicles were sourced in Donegal and that hundreds of gallons of food dye was used to turn Curracloe’s water blood red for the shoot.
Star Wars
Being the location for fairytale romances and taut psychological thrillers is all very well but who would have thought that Ireland would make an appearance in the greatest sci-fi saga ever told?
When JJ Abrams rebooted the Star Wars franchise over ten years ago, Irish eyes were smiling when he chose Sceilg Mhichíl off the coast of Kerry as the location for Luke Skywalker's exile on the remote water planet of Ahch-To. There he was in flowing white robs, skulking around the monastic beehives in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
And it that wasn’t enough, the beloved sci-fi epic returned to Ireland for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in 2017 and then one more time for Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2019 when scenes were shot on Malin Head in Donegal and the Inishowen Peninsula.
Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment, Last Jedi director Rian Johnson said, "The memories of the scenery and the towns and the people there will stick with me for the rest of my life.
"And then when we went there with the crew to film, it was late in the shoot so our whole crew knew each other very well and we spent the majority of our time in Dingle and the people just welcomed us with open arms", he said.
How I will miss IRELAND! Its' Beauty-Its' People-It's...Snack Food (#MagnificentMillie on alert for #Ep8DietPolice) pic.twitter.com/klCpbGLQ7w
— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) May 25, 2016
However, the best part of Star Wars coming to Ireland was Mark Hamill revealing his weakness for smoky bacon flavoured Tayto.
