An ‘Outer Banks’ Tour of the Carolinas

14.10.2024 - 21:30 / cntraveler.com

If you binged the first five episodes of Outer Banks season four last night, you may be asking yourself—or Google, which brought you here—where was Outer Banks filmed? If you thought the answer was the actual Outer Banks in North Carolina, you're wrong.

Before we dig into it, let's set the scene of this season first (spoilers ahead). The Pogues (the adopted name of our merry band of protagonists) have just completed their treasure-hunting escapades in the Bahamas (filmed in Barbados) and returned back home to North Carolina's Outer Banks (filmed around Charleston). John B and Sarah’s fathers were both killed in the process, but hey, who needs daddy issues when you have a big chunk of gold? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the gang quickly spends nearly the entirety of their hard-won fortune to buy back JJ’s house at a foreclosure auction and build a new “Poguelandia” where they can all live and work in peace. Happily ever after, right? Probably not.

We sat down with the show's production designer Daniel Novotny to chat about where the Outer Banks was filmed, creating the fictional town of Kildare Island by piecing together places throughout the Carolinas, what it was like shooting in North Carolina for the first time, and swimming off JJ's dock.

In season four the Pogues return home to the Outer Banks. How was it returning to shoot in Charleston?

It's like coming back to play on your home turf. Charleston has welcomed the production of Outer Banks into the city. The show's been on for four seasons and, I mean, boy, Netflix dumps a ton of money into the economy there—from the grocery stores to the repair people, just everything. We have a joke that we can take a boat trip around the city and we can point out the various docks that we have repaired, especially in Shem Creek. The reason is that if we film, it might be a working dock, but if it's not safe enough for Netflix then we have to go and repair the dock, and then we can film there. So the people who own that dock, that's just a perk. We just fix their dock for them.

For the first time, some scenes were actually filmed in North Carolina this season. What was that like?

That was groundbreaking, for sure—that was the first for our show. The show is set in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. But we ended up filming in South Carolina, and this was a good chance to go to shoot in North Carolina. So we were on Wrightsville Beach and down south of Carolina Beach by Fort Fisher. We're always on the sand there, so it was great. I mean, we went there for the beaches. Charleston is a great city, but it doesn't have the best beaches, and it doesn't allow filming on beaches. There's not good surf. I mean the beaches are pretty in South Carolina and Charleston for