lobbying effort

DUBLIN — Limerick, first settled by Vikings nearly 1,100 years ago, is a verdant sprawl of lush forests, rolling hills and liminal bogs.

But this region in midwest Ireland, steeped in folklore, where the River Shannon meets the estuary’s tidal waters before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean, is also the unlikely site of bustling production activity.

In a technology park, not far from 13th century castles, medieval ruins and picturesque villages, stands Troy Studios. Opened nine years ago in a former Dell Computer factory that shut down when it shifted manufacturing to Poland, Troy is Ireland’s biggest and newest soundstage complex.

It is here that Apple TV’s science fiction series “Foundation,” based on the Isaac Asimov masterpiece, was filmed, as was the SyFy horror series “Nightflyers,” adapted from the works of George R. R. Martin. It’s also where four prime-time American game shows are produced.

“It’s cheaper to bring 100 American people to Ireland than to walk across the lot at Fox,” actor Rob Lowe cracked on his podcast last year. Lowe is also the host of the trivia face-off show “The Floor,“ which relocated to Troy for its sixth and upcoming seventh seasons, after previously shooting at a studio south of Dublin.

Film activity in Los Angeles has plummeted to historic lows, with devastating consequences for crews and vendors. This series examines how L.A. lost its dominant perch as a film and TV destination and what can be done to bring Hollywood back home.

While some in Ireland’s fiercely proud film industry bristled at Lowe’s comments, they were, in fact, a razor-sharp distillation of the pent-up frustration runaway production has engendered across the industry in Los Angeles.

Last year, 45% of all U.S. films and scripted television shows were shot internationally, up from about 33% in 2022.

As Hollywood productions have turned away from L.A., spanning the globe chasing tax credits and rebates, Ireland increasingly has become a destination for American movies, television series and the once-quintessentially L.A. creation: the game show.

Ireland’s mix of dramatic landscapes, diverse architecture and modern and historic scenery has long been a draw for international filmmakers. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi” turned the UNESCO World Heritage site Skellig Michael, a rocky island once occupied by a 6th century monastery, into the fictional planet Ahch-To. It was Ballinesker Beach’s soft sand dunes in County Wexford that stood in for Omaha Beach in “Saving Private Ryan’s” epic opening scene.

Now, the country is increasingly a magnet for a diverse slate of American productions. In the last year alone, the USA Network’s series “The Rainmaker” wrapped its second season in Dublin; the Netflix hit series “Wednesday” shot its third season around Dublin and Wicklow; and the A24 film “The Riders” starring Brad Pitt filmed across the country over the summer. L.A.-based Blumhouse Productions has shot a slew of movies and TV shows here, including the newly released American suburban nightmare flick “Other Mommy” and the upcoming Amazon MGM Studios horror movie “Seasons,” which is set in Idaho and filming in County Wicklow.

The hit Netflix series “Wednesday” starring Jenna Ortega shot its third season around Dublin and Wicklow in Ireland.

(Netflix)

While filming in the L.A. region remains at historic lows, production spending in Ireland has soared, hitting a record $632.7 million last year, up 26% from the previous year, according to Screen Ireland, the national agency for film and television. In a survey conducted by ProdPro this year, Ireland was ranked in the top five preferred filming spots globally behind New York, the United Kingdom, California and Georgia.

With outsize interest in this small country, its sound stages are frequently full, and filmmakers say there is often a run on everything from lenses to edit bays to left-driving cars.

“Definitely post-COVID, it’s gone absolutely crazy in terms of the number of productions happening here,” said Ruth Treacy, producer and co-founder of Dublin-based production company Tailored Films, which served as co-producer on the 2024 biographical drama “The Apprentice.” Treacy and others in the industry call it a “green wave.”

“Obviously these projects are not necessarily shooting as if they’re supposed to be in Ireland,” Treacy told The Times. “It’s shooting the U.S. in Ireland, and that’s working quite well.”

The green wave grows

The seeds of the green wave were sown decades ago.

Ireland is a nation of storytellers. Over generations, it has maintained its ancient oral traditions, preserving its history, language and mythology, memorializing them on the page and eventually the screen.

Towering literary figure James Joyce helped to open the country’s first cinema, the Volta Electric Theatre, in a former metals shop in Dublin in 1909. Today, the country is said to have the highest per capita rate of moviegoers in Europe.

Ireland’s current course was set in 1980, when the government established the Irish Film Board to champion and fund domestic movies. Tax credits were introduced in 1987 to spur economic growth, but the prime minister suspended the program that same year.

Still, a small but influential group of Irish filmmakers came of age. Acclaimed movies such as “My Left Foot” and “In the Name of the Father,” directed by Jim Sheridan, and Neil Jordan’s “The Crying Game” found outside funding and became international hits. Their success and lobbying efforts prompted Michael D. Higgins, the country’s culture minister at the time, to relaunch the film board in 1993, now called Screen Ireland.

Since then, Screen Ireland has embarked on a dual strategy: to create a destination for international filmmaking and foster Irish culture on screen.

The effort has spurred a creative renaissance. In recent years, the country’s global profile has grown with a surge in homegrown talent featuring a range of actors, from Cillian Murphy to Jessie Buckley, along with projects such as “The Banshees of Inisherin” and “Normal People.” In 2023, the Irish-language film “The Quiet Girl” earned the country’s first international feature Oscar nomination. Co-production partnerships with the U.S., U.K. and other countries have flourished.

A surge of Irish films, like “The Banshees of Inisherin,” in 2022, starring Colin Farrell, has raised the profile of Irish talent internationally.

(Jonathan Hession/Searchlight Pictures)

“Across Ireland, you see a real value put on arts and culture,” said Désirée Finnegan, chief executive of Screen Ireland. “For us, the investment in talent is a strategic priority. We are filmmaker-driven, artist-led.”

In the last five years, Screen Ireland has invested nearly $170 million across film, television, animation, documentaries and game design, as well as training and early talent development, Finnegan said.

In 2021, the agency established an office in the same building as Ireland’s Los Angeles consulate to further build relationships with the U.S. entertainment industry.

Ireland’s tax incentives program has evolved into one of Europe’s most stable. It provides a 32% refundable tax credit on eligible expenditures, including salaries of cast and crew (Irish feature films qualify for more), and the per project cap has increased from $81 million to $145 million.

This year, Ireland sweetened the pot, adding VFX and post-production uplifts to the incentive program. It also became the first European country to support dedicated unscripted content, for which it offers a refundable credit of 20% on eligible Irish production expenditures, capped at $16.8 million per project.

Jake Walshe, president and CEO of Screen Scene Post Production Group and chair of the trade association VFX Ireland, helped spearhead efforts for the new post-production enhancement.

Daisy Ridley and Mark Hamill in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” The fictional planet of Ahch-to was shot on Skellig Michael, an UNESCO World Heritage site off the Irish coast.

(Jonathan Olley / Lucasfilm Ltd.)

“You’re going to see more growth in this area with this tax credit,” he said.

Another catalyst was the global success of HBO’s series “Game of Thrones,” which filmed its first season in Northern Ireland in 2010.

“We didn’t know how big ‘Game of Thrones’ was going to be,” laughed Walshe, whose Dublin company did post-production work on the project.

Since then, the visual effects studio has worked on “Shōgun,” “The Penguin,” “The Irishman” and Marvel’s “Black Widow.”

“A lot of high-level Irish crews today got their start on big productions like ‘Game of Thrones’ or ‘Penny Dreadful,’” said Michael Byrne, a former location manager here, now a Screen Ireland executive.

The green wave triggered a homegrown cottage film industry.

Model and prop maker Mark Maher returned to Ireland in 2012 after working in New Zealand.

“I did notice there was a gap there with the prop and prosthetics and no company to feed into the film studios here,” said Maher, who worked on the Showtime series “Penny Dreadful.”

AppleTV’s science fiction series “Foundation” was filmed at Troy Studios in Limerick.

(Apple TV)

In 2017, he opened Odyssey Studios in Limerick and has supplied miniatures and props to such projects as “Foundation” and “Wednesday” and also operates a training academy.

“There is a surge here in Ireland,” he said. “We were very lucky.”

An animation boom

The expanded credits have been a boon to Ireland’s once-fledgling animation industry, which now has nearly 50 studios employing about 2,500 staffers. Many partner with Disney, Netflix and Nickelodeon.

Cartoon Saloon, one of the country’s first animation studios, founded in 1999, got its start in Kilkenny, a medieval city in southeast Ireland. Its founders, Tomm Moore, Paul Young and Nora Twomey, met while studying animation at Ballyfermot College, a vocational school in a working-class Dublin suburb.

Instead of making computer animated movies like Disney/Pixar’s “Toy Story,” Cartoon Saloon decided to focus on hand-drawn Irish folklore. Its first feature, “The Secret of Kells,” released in 2009, was about manuscript-making monks. It was nominated for an Oscar, as were three other of the studio’s films, including “The Breadwinner,” executive produced by Angelina Jolie, and “Wolfwalkers,” which ran on AppleTV.

“We found that through our own authentic voices, [that] not necessarily every story has to be set in Ireland, it’s just every story that we tell has to have something that really resonates with us as a company of animators,” Twomey said.

The rise of co-productions

Many of Ireland’s best-known productions got their start at Ardmore Studios, just south of Dublin in the seaside town of Bray. It’s the country’s oldest studio, opening in 1958.

From the outside, the 18-acre campus of soundstages and back lots, nestled among the forests and mountains of County Wicklow, looks like a historic village. It was here that movies such as “The Spy that Came in from the Cold” and “The Commitments” and TV series like “Penny Dreadful” and “The Tudors” were filmed.

“Angela’s Ashes,” the 1999 adaptation of Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, also was made at the studio. More recently, Ardmore has been one of the main locations for the hit Netflix series “Wednesday,” the dark supernatural comedy starring Jenna Ortega.

David McLoughlin, the co-CEO and producer at Metropolitan Pictures, which is “Wednesday’s” Irish co-producer, has witnessed dramatic changes firsthand.

“Compared to 25 years ago, it’s obviously just a huge difference,” said McLoughlin, whose company is based at Ardmore Studios. “But that’s not just in terms of international production. There’s been an awful lot of Irish producers developing projects, and then they’re bringing in outside production partners.”

On Dublin’s north side, where the city center is divided by the River Liffey, Element Pictures operates its award-winning production company above a busy commercial street. Its conference room is filled with BAFTA awards, Golden Globes and posters from its acclaimed films such as “The Favourite” and “Room,” which each won best actress Oscars, and “Bugonia,” which was nominated for best picture.

Founded in 2001, Element is one of Ireland’s leading production companies and owned by London-based TV producer and distributor Fremantle. Founders Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe began as the local producer for BBC series shot here and cultivated relationships with European and American filmmakers and distributors to develop their own projects.

It’s a successful model others have adopted.

“We’ve seen that change from something that was a kind of weird, little curiosity making strange, small films to something that actually has a kind of profile on the international stage,” Guiney said.

Not far from Dublin’s Trinity College are the offices of Wild Atlantic Pictures, named after the 1,500-mile stretch of western Ireland’s rugged coastline. The company began by co-producing with various American and British studios, emerging as a force in the industry here and abroad.

Timothy Dalton and Eva Green in “Penny Dreadful,” the Gothic psychological drama set in Victorian London but filmed in Ireland.

(Jonathan Hession/SHOWTIME)

In recent years, Wild Atlantic served as a co-producer or the Irish production company on such films as Richard Linklater’s Oscar-nominated “Blue Moon,” “Cocaine Bear” with Universal and “The Green Knight” with A24, as well as Apple TV’s “Foundation” and the Netflix dark comedy series “Bodkin.”

“Every film I’ve made is a co-production of some description,” said Macdara Kelleher, the company’s co-CEO and founder. “It’s not an unusual thing for Irish people, for a small country. There’s just a limit to the amount that you can raise in Ireland, and U.S. films dominate our box office.”

Kelleher points to Wild Atlantic’s relationship with Santa Monica-based Blumhouse Productions.

“They’re a great partner and they give us access,” he said. The companies have a number of projects in various stages of development, including the horror film “Seasons” and the TV adaptation of John Grisham’s “The Rainmaker.”

Doubling for America

As Ireland has emerged as a major film hub, it increasingly has become a double for America.

About 15 miles south of Dublin in County Wicklow lies the Powerscourt Estate, with its 47 acres of gardens and the iconic waterfall featured in the 1981 Arthurian legend film “Excalibur.” The area also was transformed into the fictional seat of power for the “Vikings” series commissioned by the History Channel.

The iconic waterfall in Powerscourt Estate has served as the backdrop for a number of films including 1981’s “Excalibur.”

(Stacy Perman/Los Angeles Times)

More recently, the same expanse of forest and lakes masqueraded as Appalachia in the film “Cocaine Bear,” Elizabeth Banks’ dark comedy and true story about a black bear that ate a massive amount of cocaine dropped by a drug smuggler in Georgia.

Beginning in 2024, veteran Irish production director Susie Cullen worked back-to-back on four movies all set in America but filmed in Ireland, including “Abigail,” the Boston-based vampire horror-comedy, and “Blue Moon,” a movie set in 1943 Manhattan about troubled lyricist Lorenz Hart, played by Ethan Hawke.

“Part of being a production designer is to create something, to create a fantasy or period, and that part of the challenge is kind of great,” Cullen said.

Cullen re-created the historic Broadway haunt Sardi’s on a soundstage at Ardmore Studios. A local artist mimicked the restaurant’s famed caricatures of celebrities, using the faces of the crew.

For the scene showing the Broadway opening of “Oklahoma!” set at St. James Theatre, Cullen said they filmed at the Gaiety, a 155-year-old opera house on Dublin’s South King Street near St. Stephen’s Green. At the time, “Riverdance,” the traditional Irish step dance troupe, was performing at the theater.

“We just had a little mini-version of ‘Oklahoma!’ in the theater, on ‘Riverdance’s’ day off,” Cullen said. “We got there in the morning and put our set in front of theirs and they shot that evening and we took ours down and ‘Riverdance’ was back the next day.”

The soundstages of Ardmore Studios hosted another production, the TV adaptation of the John Grisham’s 1995 bestselling novel “The Rainmaker” for USA Network.

While the book takes place in Memphis, Tenn., the producers wanted to update the legal thriller, setting the story in present-day Charleston, S.C.

“I was thrilled,” recalled Dan Rogers, a senior project manager with the South Carolina Film Commission, and he said that “we’d love to bring it here” after a production executive told him the series was expressly written for Charleston.

But months later, Rogers was informed the studio decided to film elsewhere. Much to his surprise, the location wasn’t L.A. or even another Southern U.S. city — but Ireland.

Showrunner Michael Seitzman said it was a matter of money.

“You’re trying to maximize that budget, make the biggest show you can, make a show that looks like the one that you wrote on the page,” he said, adding, “every producer is having the same conversation right now.”

Seitzman estimates he saved about $10 million for a 10-episode season because of the tax credits and lower costs for labor and other production expenses. Another bonus: He could cast supporting local actors adept at shifting to an American accent.

The series has shot at locations around Dublin, including a former 18th century military school, St. Mary’s Hospital, that became the fictional North City Hospital. Ireland’s oldest school of law was transformed into various institutions in Charleston.

The King’s Inns, Ireland’s oldest school of law, has doubled for various institutions in Charleston, S.C., in the TV series “The Rainmaker” and the Explorer’s Club in “Penny Dreadful.”

(Stacy Perman/Los Angeles Times)

For Season 2, which wrapped in August, Seitzman had become so familiar and enthralled with Dublin that he created a storyline in Ireland over a few episodes.

“We could really shoot Ireland for Ireland, which was fantastic,” he said. “Suddenly we could stop hiding all the beautiful things we were seeing.”

Despite taking place in the Appalachian Mountains of north Georgia, “Cocaine Bear” was filmed in County Wicklow.

(Universal Pictures)

Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart in “Blue Moon” stands outside the iconic Manhattan restaurant Sardi’s recreated on an Irish soundstage.

(Sabrina Lantos/Sony Pictures Classics)

Game show mecca

Perhaps the biggest wave to crash on Irish shores is the American game show.

In January, BiggerStage — the television production company that has co-partnered with Fox Entertainment and produces six shows in Ireland for American prime time — invested a reported $11.2 million in a deal to create a global, unscripted production hub at Troy Studios in Limerick.

“We did it because we see a real opportunity to increase the amount of work here, and that’s both work we create as much as it is work that we partner with other producers around the world,” said Sean O’Riordan, BiggerStage’s chief creative officer.

Pat Kiely, a former managing director of Virgin Media Television, launched the Dublin-based company five years ago to develop original content — particularly in the unscripted segment for the global market — and position Ireland as an international television center (hence the company name).

Meanwhile, Fox Entertainment had launched something called the international fund. The idea was to pilot an idea for a show and see how it could be produced for less money, partnering with international networks or production companies.

Rob Lowe hosts the Fox trivia game show “The Floor” from a soundstage in Ireland.

(Dan Smith/FOX)

The first was a singing talent show called “The Big Deal” that BiggerStage produced for an Irish audience.

Impressed by the quality and cost-effectiveness of the show, Fox quickly began discussing collaborating on other productions with BiggerStage.

“They were incredible partners creatively. And so from there we were able to know we had a trusted production partner in Ireland,” said Allison Wallach, head of unscripted programming at Fox Entertainment Studio.

In 2022, Fox relocated “Name That Tune” from Australia to Dublin. That same year, “Beat Shazam,” the game show hosted by Jamie Foxx, relocated from Television City in Los Angeles to Ireland, where Fox also launched a series of shows including “The Floor” hosted by Lowe and “Next Level Chief.” In all, BiggerStage produces about 100 hours of American prime-time shows in Ireland.

BiggerStage leveraged its success with Fox to lobby the Irish government for the unscripted tax credit to attract even more growth.

“Hubs are going to be more crucial than ever to make things work at a price point,” Wallach said. “And I think that BiggerStage and actually Ireland is really well suited to be that hub for Europe and for the U.S.”