Actor Natalie Gavin described the locations as “quite extraordinary”.
Andrew Buchan (Broadchurch) has made his screenwriting debut with Passenger, an ITV six-parter starring Wunmi Mosaku (Loki, Luther) as Riya Ajunwa, a disillusioned detective inspector who spends her days managing “small town issues”.
But when a young girl goes missing, Riya’s sleuthing takes her to places she could never have anticipated.
The action unfolds in Chadder Vale, a fictional town in the north of England.
But the cast and crew did pitch up in a real northern English town, which some of you might recognise.
Read more:
- Passenger review: Wunmi Mosaku shines in this Happy Valley, Stranger Things hybrid
- Andrew Buchan on the “seed” that inspired Passenger
Where is ITV’s Passenger filmed?
Filming took place in Cornholme, which is a village in West Yorkshire, surrounded by the Pennine Hills.
“It has its own weather system,” said Mosaku. “It will be really sunny and then it’ll snow and then it’ll rain and then it’ll be sunny again. That feels very individual and isolated. It feels far from Manchester, even though it’s not far at all.”
She added: “Then we’ve got the scenes with the forest and the snow. It feels like walking into Narnia. It’s really beautiful and our DOPs have made it look magical.
“There’s this kind of otherworldly element to it. It feels like that small little town, just elevated in a way. The terraced houses, the smaller two-up two-down. I love it.”
Natalie Gavin, who plays Joanne Wells, described the locations as “quite extraordinary”.
“I remember the first day of getting out of the car and the hills are alive,” she said. “They are literally like a hundred foot tall, so high over the houses. It traps you and makes you want to see the other side.”
Executive producer Lucy Dyke also spoke about the importance of making Chadder Vale feel “authentic”.
“It was such an important thing for us that this show was made in the place that Andy wrote about,” she explained.
“He’s from Bolton originally, and he writes about these characters with such affection because they’re people he knows – not ‘knows’ in a literal sense, but there is a sense of people that he knows and the people that he grew up with.
“The idea of the show was that it should feel really grounded and should feel real. The characters in it feel real and people you could meet.”
Dyke also revealed that Todmorden, which is near where they filmed, is “allegedly the place where the most UFOs have ever been seen in the UK”.
“Cornholme has this eerie quality to it,” she added. “It’s a really sweet little village, but it doesn’t get sunlight for four months of the year. Between November and February, the sun never rises above the hills, which gives it this kind of slightly ‘other’ quality, which is really important to us for Chadder Vale.
“It feels like a real place, but there’s something that’s not quite right about it. That was really important to us to maintain throughout the filming of the show.”
Passenger airs on ITV1 and ITVX. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to see what’s on tonight.
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