The production company who made Netflix’s The Stranger, Red, have created a Harlen Coben televisual universe of sorts in that region. Their other Coben production for Netflix Safe was also filmed in the area, while The Five (which aired on U.K. channel Sky One in 2016) was filmed in Liverpool, about an hour’s drive away from Manchester.
As those adaptations of his work have all been shot in the same area, Coben admitted to Manchester Evening News that some locations have been used in more than one adaptation. The crime writer said: “Even now I come to Manchester and I think, why does that look familiar? It’s because I’ve seen the location so many times in one of my series.”
As to where The Stranger is set, the name of the town is never revealed, but is assumed to be a town or suburb outside of Manchester judging by the accents of characters like Johanna Griffin (Siobhan Finneran) and Tripp (Shaun Dooley).
At a press screening for the series, Finneran joked that her natural Mancunian accent might make her hard to understand for American audiences. “Hopefully I make sense and it’s clear, or they’ll have to put subtitles up, won’t they,” the Downton Abbey actor said.
The Netflix series shot on location in the region in March to August 2019, with Coben telling Manchester Evening News, “We filmed all across Manchester for the most part, as well as places around the city like Bolton. It’s a great place to shoot TV. There is some really incredible architecture in the region that looks great on screen.”
The local news site has compiled a map of a number of locations from the series. For example, the school attended by Adam (Richard Armitage) and Tripp’s kids is in reality Bolton School, while one of the shooting locations for the sports club, which much of the action revolves around, is the real-life Monton Sports Club outside of Manchester.
Other scenes were shot in and around the Plaza theatre and cinema in Stockport, which in 2019 also appeared as Birmingham’s Bingley Hall in an episode of Netflix’s Peaky Blinders. Red, meanwhile, shot another series in the area in 2019, with the HBO dystopian drama Years and Years starring Emma Thompson also filming in Manchester.
The Stranger is streaming now on Netflix.
