The lead actor recalls how welcoming the crew and people of Svalbard were as she sampled moose stew and reindeer and visited a husky café home to retired sledge dogs. Suranne notes how the cast were kitted out with heated gloves and gilets and would settle down beside the fire of an evening; unsurprising considering Svalbard’s average September temperatures of 1°C to 3°C.
When asked about her favourite day of filming, Naomi Yang (who plays Shen Jia) said: “There was one day in Svalbard where a very small team of us went to a glacier. I was hiking in my crampons up this glacier. We were with someone with a rifle, because we had to have a rifle with us all the time in case it was needed to scare off polar bears. The glaciers are very blue, due to the way the light is reflected I just remember all of us just being like ‘wow, we can’t believe we’re in this’.”
Following the renewal of Vigil for a second series, filming took place across Scotland and Morocco during spring 2023. The second outing follows Silva’s team to the Al-Shawka Air Base in the Kingdom of Wudyan, a fictional location supposedly located in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. As a Royal Air Force prototype combat drone is compromised and kills several soldiers, the team set about trying to find the perpetrator.
In an interview ahead of series two’s release, Romola Garai (who plays Acting Squadron Leader Eliza Russell) said, “We were in Casablanca and then Rabat so there’s a completely different aesthetic to the first series. 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. It’s a totally different experience for the viewer as we explore a different world within the military.”
As Silva embarks on a journey to the Kingdom, her partner Longacre stays behind in Scotland to lead the investigation there. According to Uni-Versal Extras, Scotland locations to look out for across the series include Glasgow, Luss, North Ayrshire, Lanark, Blantyre, Cumbernauld and Motherwell.
We first meet DCI Amy Silva and the team when a crew member of the Trident nuclear submarine HMS Vigil is found dead. The police are granted access to investigate, but there’s a catch – the UK’s nuclear deterrent must remain unbroken, meaning the submarine stays on patrol. Despite the death being written off as an overdose, foul play is suspected, but the confined space of the submarine hides many dark secrets.
Due to their classified nature, the production team weren’t granted access to real blueprints for nuclear submarines. Filming inside a real submarine would also have been logistically impossible, or at least extremely challenging, so a full-size replica was constructed in BBC Dumbarton Studios in Scotland. The scale of the set, which took up an entire sound stage, reportedly stunned the actors.
“The set just blew my mind,” said Surenne Jones. “The size of the subs in real life are extraordinary – they’re like four floors, with a bomb shop and missile room. The details that the designers put in is quite something, especially as they couldn’t get blueprints of real submarines to work from, because you’re not allowed to have them. So they had to be talked through what was there by people who had first-hand knowledge of submarines, and then come up with their own design off the back of that.”