Arriving at Eastnor often feels like walking onto a film set. For location manager Sue Quinn, it actually was one – a TV set, the one she'd selected as the Roy family's ancestral home in HBO's Succession.
‘Eastnor stood out because it had so many different beautiful bedrooms on the first floor that worked for the scenes that had been written,’ Sue says. ‘It's also a wonderful setting and beautifully placed with fantastic interiors. And it had space for 150 people at tables for [the dinner scenes].’
For anyone who hasn't seen it, Succession is the award-winning drama about the Roy family's fight for control of their company, Waystar Royco, as patriarch Logan (Brian Cox) declines in health. The final two episodes of season one centre on the wedding of his daughter Shiv – held, on screen, at her mother's ancestral home. That home is Eastnor Castle.
The Great Hall doubled as a party venue in Succession
So, in 2018 – during the “Beast from the East” winter storm – the 350-strong cast and crew of Succession descended on the Eastnor estate for eight weeks to film the season finale.
‘The whole location department had one of the houses on the estate,’ recalls Sue. ‘And the rest of the cast and crew were in every hotel, Airbnb and available space in and around the area.’
Sue headed up the location team – a role she's had on what feels like every blockbuster British film and TV show going: Harry Potter, Love Actually, Notting Hill, Edge of Tomorrow, Pirates of the Caribbean. Her job, she explains, is to work closely with the director and designer to find places that fit their vision, then make them work logistically.
Sue Quinn, Succession's Location Manager
And for Succession, Eastnor checked the key boxes: enough differently designed bedrooms to suit the script, easy reach of London, room to house cast and crew, and a terrace that could take the huge glass marquee for the wedding reception scene.
But Sue, and the writing team, soon discovered that Eastnor talks back. The show's creator, Jesse Armstrong, set up a writer's room in the castle and began adapting the script to the building itself.
‘[The writers] saw the location, or things in the location, and they would adapt the script to suit it,’ she says. ‘That's what really worked about Eastnor: we were able to adapt whatever was required very quickly.’
Watch what happened behind the scenes when Succession filmed at Eastnor
Some of the show's most pivotal moments happened here. The wedding party, of course, took place in the Great Hall, the furniture and objets d'art painstakingly moved out of the way to accommodate not only all the on-screen guests, but the cast and crew. Kendall (Jeremy Strong) tries to force a takeover of the family company on his father (Brian Cox) in the State Bathroom. Shiv admits her affair in the Queen's Bedroom. The final, intense scene of Kendall crying in his father's arms is in the Gothic Drawing Room.
Kendall and Logan Roy (Jeremy Strong and Brian Cox) in the Gothic Drawing Room
The castle's grandeur can take this level of drama. But what made Eastnor really special, says Sue, is how welcoming the staff and family were: the “anything goes” attitude that our party guests also love.
‘Because it's still in private hands, you can move things and do things which you can't do in some of the nationally owned houses,’ Sue explains. ‘And the estate staff and owners were absolutely wonderful. We asked a lot of them – we even kicked everybody out of the estate office to use as a location because the writers decided they would quite like to use it – and they were just a delight to work with.’
On a personal note, Sue's favourite rooms at Eastnor are the Chinese Bedroom and the Great Hall.
‘I found it really relaxing and very homely in there,’ she says, talking about the Great Hall. ‘And the dining room! The cast and directors did their read-through in there and absolutely loved it.’
But the best thing about Eastnor? Its period. ‘I think it's wonderful; the Gothic Revival style is just very special,’ she says. ‘It's got a charm about it. It feels real'.