Connie Nielsen and Christopher Eccleston headline Channel 4’s new domestic thriller Close to Me, based on the novel of the same name.
The drama follows Jo Harding (Nielsen in the Close to Me cast), a Danish translator and mother-of-two who suffers a brain trauma, and loses all memory of the past year. As she struggles to remember everything that happened to her, she must contend with the fact that those around her are keeping secrets.
Speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com, Nielsen described Close to Me as a “coming of age” story for older female viewers. She said: “It’s my hope that when people – when women especially are watching this, they experience a sensation of being seen.”
The drama unfolds against a picturesque backdrop, with green countryside landscapes and glimpses of the coast and seaside. The drama, which will be box-setted after episode one airs, was filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read on for everything you need to know about the filming locations used for Close to Me.
Where is Close to Me filmed?
Channel 4 thriller Close to Me was filmed predominantly in Hastings, a town in South East England, and along the south coast. However, other specific locations were used, including Eastbourne.
Speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com, Nielsen said: “We were kind of all over the place. Some things were filmed out by Windsor, some down in Hastings and Eastbourne. They were in all different places, but they had to come together as a lived-in landscape as well as reality, and then you could put [them] together, and so I think that was really well done.”
Eccleston (who plays Jo’s husband, Rob) joked that he took his “bucket and spade” for days out filming on the coast. “We were filming flashbacks from high summer, in autumn, but we had these freak weather days which helped us,” he explained. “We’d all been locked away since March, so we had cabin fever and were just delighted to be working, earning, being creative.”
On the show’s appeal, Eccleston said the drama is a “lovely reversal” of the on-screen gender dynamics usually portrayed in TV dramas.
“This show had a lovely reversal of the usual, far too familiar, sensitive, caring female taking a supportive role to a male as they wrestle with existential dilemmas. This was very refreshing,” he said.
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Nielsen said of the south coast: “It was lovely, the cliffs were beautiful. I was amazed by the countryside and the physical beauty of the nature; it was just amazing.”
She continued: “The COVID protocols were absolutely exhausting, but the fact that we really adhered to them is the reason why we never had a positive case on our 80-member crew… The worst part for me was that as I was travelling back and forth between London and Copenhagen with my children in school, then the borders closed because Denmark had the mink variant, so that was very hard. But the crew were so resilient and worked so hard.”
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