Vigil season 2 filming location: Is Wudyan a real place?
The hit BBC crime drama Vigil returns this weekend for its second season, starring Suranne Jones as DCI Amy Silva and Rose Leslie as DI Kirsten Longacre, as they once again face a fraught international incident.
This time the submarine isn't part of equation but, in its stead, is a British Air Force weapons test gone wrong in the Middle Eastern country Wudyan. DCI Silva is sent out to investigate and comes up against Acting Squadron Leader Eliza Russell (Romola Garai) in the process.
The Middle Eastern scenes were shot in Morocco, given that the country Wudyan is a fictional place invented for the purposes of the show. Romola Garai spoke about shooting the majority of her scenes in Casablanca and Rabat, and how they created "a completely different aesthetic" for the second season of Vigil.
"We’ve got these vast desert landscapes of openness and heat haze, people disappearing into a massive horizon – rather than being locked up in a tiny submarine, as we saw in series one," she said. "It’s a totally different experience for the viewer as we explore a different world within the military."
Vigil's executive producer Jake Lushington credited the show's production company World Productions with helping to piece together a composite picture of Wudyan as both one which is "resonant of the Middle East and its own fictional world".
Lushington went on to speak at the show's launch about how they often purposefully fictionalise elements – like the insignia on uniforms reading British Air Force, rather than Royal Air Force – in order to distinguish the drama from documentaries.
He said: "Some people sometimes think that's a mistake, but actually we've done that so that the audience can have some point of difference from a documentary. But beyond that, we do as much research as possible."
The production has consulted military experts and people who have served for both seasons of the show, something which writer and creator Tom Edge said they "take seriously". He added: "Sometimes we get the pushback of, 'You've got the buttons wrong'. But we actually have to get the buttons wrong for copyright reasons.
"My favourite incredibly fair-minded response in season one was [when] a rear admiral was asked to comment on the veracity of it and said all of the things that are in the show either have happened or could happen, but perhaps not in one week."
Lushington added: "The formal relationship with those organisations tends to be a bit more distant. We're not actively making this with any of those organisations directly. We let them know that we're doing it, but MI5 doesn't really want to talk to us and that is probably a good thing."
Vigil season 2 airs from Sunday, December 10 on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
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