'Outer Banks' Isn’t Actually Filmed On the Outer Banks
Outer Banks is one of the Netflix's newest original series.
Despite the show's name, it wasn't filmed in the North Carolina location.
An anti-LGBTQ+ law is behind the reason for the location change.
Outer Banks, one of the newest original scripted dramas to drop on Netflix, tells the story of two groups of local teenagers (the Pogues vs. the Kooks, if you want to get all West Side Story) who are searching for buried treasure supposedly hidden in the middle of the town. Viewers would appear to be eating the show up, as it currently sits within the Top 10 shows reported on the streaming site's homepage chart.
With the title of the show, based on a string of small islands off the coasts of North Carolina and Virginia, one would think that production would take the cast and crew to the actual location to film. It turns out, the location for the shoot changed multiple times, with a political issue being the driving force behind the switch.
Back in January 2019, Netflix announced that the series would not shoot in North Carolina due to the state having a law called House Bill 2, also known as “the bathroom law.” What was the law that dated back to 2016? According to Newsweek, it essentially said that transgender people must use the bathrooms that matched the sex on their birth certificates. Despite parts of the bill being repealed, certain areas of North Carolina were still upholding the law.
Jonas Pate, co-creator of the series and a resident of Wilmington, North Carolina, tried to advocate to abolish the law, as he hoped for the series to shoot in his hometown, the location the location he envisioned when writing the show. Many of the series’ cast and crew also spoke out against the anti-LGBTQ+ law.
“This tiny law is costing this town seventy good, clean, pension-paying jobs,” Pate told to the Fayetteville Observer at the time, “and sending a message to those people who can bring these jobs and more that North Carolina still doesn’t get it.”
Instead, production moved one state south, shooting in Charleston, South Carolina and bringing along many of the Wilmington-based crew. As much as Pate wasn’t happy with the decision at the time, he’s happy now with the direction Netflix chose. “When we wrote [Outer Banks],” Pate told the Wilmington Star News, “it was 100 percent Wilmington in our heads. We wanted to film it here. But Netflix made the right decision to insist on inclusivity and we completely agree with them.”
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