The Spy Who Dumped Me filming locations

The Spy Who Dumped Me filming locations

The Spy Who Dumped Me is an obvious comedy allusion to the famous 1977 James Bond movie with Roger Moore called ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. One would claim that it is a cinematic crime to compare an action comedy with Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon with the established 007 classic, but the 2018 movie is worth a portion of the audience’s attention. Being a female spy/action/comedy buddy movie, ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’ successfully satirizes many of the genre cliches, including the old-shoe journeys across Europe. Two American girls get into the hot water of events and dangers in Los Angeles, but their search for the truth brings them to Europe to follow the steps of James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Ethan Hunt. Los Angeles makes space for Vienna, Prague, Amsterdam, Budapest, Berlin, and Paris, since the case of international importance can be solved only internationally. For most of the American audience, Europe still resembles something exotic, and the movie captures this masterfully, even though most of the movie was filmed in Budapest, Hungary, one of the key cinematic capitals of the Old World. For me, a Ukrainian, visiting The Spy Who Dumped Me filming locations became an adventure as well, albeit not to the same extent as for the heroines of Kunis and McKinnon. 

The principal photography took place in Budapest between July and September 2017, and according to later interviews, the cast was fascinated by the city, including Mila Kunis and her husband Ashton Kutcher, who enjoyed their trip to Europe and even visited Kunis’ birthplace in Ukraine during the production. All the studio shots were staged at the ORIGO Studios at the northern end of Budapest, a huge European cinematic hub with 19 000 square meters of useful space known for the production of such movies as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Inferno (2016), Atomic Blonde (2017), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and Dune (2021). While the filming crew, under the leadership of a female director, Susanna Fogel, did a lot of interior scenes in the studio, they shot many outdoor sequences in the streets of Budapest, which worked for other cities. The crew shot several scenes in Vienna, making it the second most important location during production, a few panoramic shots of Prague and Berlin, none in Lithuania, and episodic in Paris, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles. Budapest played a part in the absolute majority of exterior sequences. 

To start with, the Vilnius opening sequence was completely staged in Budapest. The interior shots in the Origo Studios and Lithuanian depressing street market were built as a set in a parking lot on Szigony Street in the Southeast part of the city. An old residential quarter at Bezeredi Utca (Utca means Street in English) was used for a few panoramic seconds when Justin Theroux’s character leaves the building after the explosion. The same courtyard was used in ‘Atomic Blonde’ just a year before. Unfortunately, I missed these two intriguing locations during my visit to Budapest in 2021. The filmmakers used CGI to make Budapest look like other cities in the movie agenda from expanding the width of the streets during the car chase to modifying the background for panoramic shots. For example, the southern suburb of Budapest called Scepel was used to depict a section of Amsterdam with its channels. The production designers turned the local pub called Szatyor into a whimsical Berlin pub, and they made a Budapest cloth store look like a shop in Los Angeles, where Kunis’ characters worked. Finally, several Hungarian stars: Lívia Habermann, Ágnes Bánfalvy, Attila Árpa, and Áron László got episodic roles in the movie. 

 

COMING TO VIENNA

After a gunshot at Morgan’s place and witnessing the death of several people (as the story shows, one of them pretended), the two friends decide to go to Austria to fulfill the supposedly last will of Drew. Audrey feels obliged to go to Vienna, find the Schiele Cafe, and meet someone called Verne at 11 o’clock the next day. Of course, she would never have agreed to complete this mission alone if her faithful friend Morgan had not been nearby. After a short sequence at the Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport, which serves as Los Angeles’ international gates, the movie takes us to Vienna with several breathtaking panoramic shots. 

The first opening sequence of Vienna takes its viewer to ‘Schloss Schonbrunn’ (Schonbrunn Palace) and more precisely to its park, which is generally open from 6.30 a.m. The camera was set near the Palace from a low perspective in the direction of the Park, the ‘Neptunbrunnen’ Fountain, and the famous Gloriette structure with its arcaded wings. A monumental Baroque pavilion was built in 1775, was damaged in WWII, and was later restored. The structure is set on a hill that dominates the area and gives a nice panorama of Vienna. 

Only a few seconds at Schonbrunn Park make space for a camera set in the horse carriage, which makes its way along the famous Vienna Ring, a grand boulevard that stretches for more than five kilometers in the heart of the city. A magnificent building in this scene is the Austrian Parliament Building, built in 1883. At the time of the filming in 2017, it was open from all sides until the start of the renovation process, which lasted six years until 2023.

If anyone wants to define the heart of Vienna on the map, it would be the Stephansdom and Graben Street. The movie gives us only a small perspective of the location by focusing on the statue ensemble of the Josefbrunnen Fountain. It is a composition depicting the scene of the betrothal of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph. The fountain was installed in 1732 in the Baroque style, and the main material for its manufacture was marble. 

For a few moments, the camera moves to the famous Hofburg Palace, a former residence of the Habsburg dynasty, originally built in the 13th century and later largely expanded. One such expansion took place between 1889 and 1893 and resulted in the creation of St. Michael’s Wing, the outer part of the Palace facing Michaelerplatz Square. We see one of the three domes of this wing. 

What would the opening sequence about Vienna be without a visual reference to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, particularly since later in the film, Morgan jokes about the fact that the Austrians admire the composer and prefer not to mention that Adolf Hitler was also an Austrian? The statue is seven meters high and was originally placed in another location in 1896 and moved to its current site in Burggarten Park in 1953. 

Finally, after the shot change of Vienna, we see two heroines, Audrey and Morgan, standing amid a picturesque square. Even though most of the movie was filmed in Budapest and the city was represented as Vienna, particularly, this particular scene was shot in Austria’s capital. We come back to St. Michael’s Square or ‘Michaelerplatz’ in German. This cozy but important open space next to the Hofburg Palace is known as one of the most ancient parts of Vienna from the times of the Roman Empire. Nowadays, the center of the square shows the ruins of the Roman buildings and serves as an open-air museum. Michaelerplatz got its modern name around 1850 and its baroque look at the end of the 19th century in parallel with the construction of the St. Michael’s Wing of Hofburg. The Square was named after the church of the same name from the 13th century, which still stands here. It is interesting to note that the first six-candelabra gaslight city lanterns were installed on the square back in 1838, and in 1927, Vienna’s first roundabout for vehicles was opened along the perimeter of Michaelerplatz. 

Audrey and Morgan stand just in front of St. Michael’s Wing (Michaeiertrakt), famous for its fountains and domes from the 19th century. Just between two heroines, we see the magnificent St. Michael’s Gate, the largest portal of its kind in the former Habsburg capital. When the two main characters are seen from the front, the street behind them is Reitschulgasse with a Starbucks cafe to the left. It is worth noting that one of the scenes from Red Sparrow, when the heroine Jennifer Lawrence opens a bank account in Vienna, was also filmed on St. Michael’s Square just a few months before the filming process of The Spy Who Dumped Me in the same 2017. 

 

THE RESTAURANT GUNFIRE (BUDAPEST)

All Audrey knew about the enormously important mission in Vienna was that she had to find the cafe called Schiele and find a man or a woman named Verne at 11 a.m. There is no restaurant of such a name in the city except for a small Arabian fast food spot not far from the Western Railway Station. The two heroines find a beautifully furnished restaurant with a high ceiling, luxury interior, and mirrors, supposed to speak about the history of the Habsburg monarchy, and in a matter of a few minutes, the main fire-and-run scene takes place. Audrey meets Sebastian Henshaw, Verne is killed, as well as numerous ‘bad guys’ in different ways, from bullets to being drowned in fondue: all in a pursuit to get the parcel, which Audrey and Morgan brought from Los Angeles. What prevented the bad guys from intercepting the girls on the way from the airport remains a mystery. In this case, we would be deprived of intrigue, and we would not see how a luxurious Viennese restaurant is riddled with bullets and destroyed by abandoned bodies.

Like in many upcoming scenes in ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’, what it meant to be shot in a specific place was actually staged in Budapest. The whole sequence was filmed not in the real Viennese cafe but in a closed restaurant in the center of Budapest. Similar to the Michaelerplatz as the opening location, the filming crew of ‘Red Sparrow’ came first in the early months of 2017: in one of the scenes, the characters of Jennifer Lawrence and Matthias Schoenaerts have a conversation in a luxury, furnished restaurant. This former favorite place of the citizens of Budapest was known as the ‘Alexandra Bookcafe’ and was closed for the planned renovation in 2017 and used as a production set for two movies, which premiered the next year: ‘Red Sparrow’ and ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’. While the scene from the first was peaceful, the second movie got permission to turn the cafe into a shooting scene after minor art alterations to fit the Viennese atmosphere of the famous ‘Café Sacher’. 

The building in which the Alexandra Bookcafe was once located was inaugurated as far back as 1911 as the Parisian Department Store (Párizsi Nagy Áruház) on Andrassy ut Street, a fashionable shopping street in Budapest. Since its opening, it impressed the guests with its atrium, spacious halls, high ceiling, and glass-mirrored elevators in Art Nouveau style, which soon made the Parisian Department Store one of the most beautiful buildings in the city. The building miraculously survived the damage of WWII but was nationalized after the war, to be once again bought after the collapse of the communist regime. It is interesting that in 2005 it was bought by a French-owned real estate group, and after the renovation and reopening in 2010, the ‘Alexandra Bookcafe’ became one of its most famous attractions. The cafe with a Neo-Renaissance ballroom was a part of a giant bookstore, one of the largest in Hungary. As I have stated before, it was closed in 2017, later reopened under another name, ‘Café Parisi’, but was once again closed with the whole building. 

 

CROSSING THE VIENNESE STREET (VIENNA)

When Audrey and Morgan leave the battle scene in the Viennese cafe, there is a brief sequence with the girls crossing the street with a tram line, a shop called Vispring, and a building with a notable red tower in the far background. Even though the restaurant set for the previous scene was created in a closed cafe in the center of Budapest, Hungary, these few shots of Audrey and Morgan crossing the street were taken in Vienna again. The street is called Siebensterngasse, which can be translated as ‘The Seven Star Alley’. This transport artery in the heart of Vienna has been known on the city maps since the XVII and named Siebensterngasse in 1862 after one of the buildings and its sign with the inscription ‘Seven Stars’. The street bears significance for Austrian movie enthusiasts because the quarter around it was once known as the ‘Film district’ with many film studios and distribution companies located here in the first half of the 20th century. With time, the movie companies have gone, but nowadays there are still a few cinemas on Siebensterngasse and the office of a famous Viennale: Vienna International Film Festival. The building Siebensterngasse on 13/15/21 with the red roof in the background of the scene was built back in 1826. 

 

STEALING A CAR (BUDAPEST)

A few moments after crossing the Viennese street, the girls run next to a fountain and unsuccessfully try to steal a car from two elderly Austrians. 1976 Jaguar XJ-S has a manual gearbox, and instead of car expropriation, we get one of the funniest scenes in the whole movie with Audrey trying to make the car move and then leaving it a few meters further. It is important to understand that this particular scene was filmed neither near Siebensterngasse in Vienna nor anywhere in the Austrian capital, but once again in Budapest at a cozy square called Corvin ter (Corvin Square). The fountain in the scene is known as ‘Lajos kútja’ or ‘Lajos’ well’; it was built in 1904 at the expense of a local entrepreneur, Millacher Lajos, and named after him. In his will, he left money to the city for a memorial fountain in which his face could be seen. Later on in the story, another scene with Audrey and Morgan on the bikes would be filmed just a few blocks from Corvin Ter. 

This scene from ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’ is remarkable because Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon are not the only professional actors seen on the screen. A couple of seniors are not Austrian but Hungarian actors: Bánfalvy Ágnes (born 1954) and Áron László (born 1945). Laszlo is better known to the international audience for his secondary roles in ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ (2008) and ‘The Pillars of the Earth’ (2010), while Hungarian actress Banfalvy starred in ‘An American Rhapsody’ (2001). 

 

THE TAXI CAR CHASE (BUDAPEST) 

Followed by a failed attempt to expropriate Jaguar from two supposed Austrians, Audrey and Morgan continue their running across the streets of Vienna (according to the story) and finally come across a free taxi car. This scene and the whole upcoming car chase sequence were staged in Budapest in the area to the south of Nyugati Railway Station, across the river from the previous location, with a Jaguar car. The narrow street where they saw the taxi is called Szobi, and the car was parked near the intersection with Karman Utca Street. Like Vienna and Paris, Budapest is also divided into city districts, and the one used for the car chase seen in ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’ is the VI district called Terezvaros. In English, the toponym means ‘Theresa Town’ and was named after the famous Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780). 

The taxi car is a 2014 Citroën C4 Picasso Série 2, and there is a hint that we are not in Austria anymore because of the fake license plates, which show the non-existent AU letters instead of the ‘W’ letter for the Vienna district. The filmmakers meant Austria by using the AU abbreviation. As the taxi driver moves a little further down Szobi Street, we see three characters on a wider street called Eotvos. The location is easily recognizable due to a notable white office building in the background known as the ‘Eiffel office building’. This background is worth noting because, in the next few minutes, we will see the same building several times since most of the car chase scene was filmed along Eotvos Street in Budapest, which was widened by the CGI in some shots. Apart from Hungarian architecture, we all see a typical Budapest phone booth in one shot, and the advertisement posters are in Hungarian. A few brief sequences with the car passing by a small park were filmed near the Almassy Ter Park, further south. 

The whole chase scene is, of course, a parody of dozens of its spy-action predecessors. The point here is that instead of a trained agent, we have two scared girls, who, anyway, lose the tail of armed bicycle drivers. The scene culminates with the last chaser being thrown on the road after a rapid brake show by Audrey and hit by a giant bus. The scene was filmed at the intersection of Nemet Street and Rakoczi Square in the VIII district of Budapest, called Jozsefvaros, once named after Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (1741-1790). Rakoczi Square got its modern shape in the 19th century and its name in 1871 after the Hungarian national hero Ferenc Rakoczi (1676-1735). The site is famous for its large market hall that was built in 1892 and still operates today. The area was once notoriously known for its high crime rate. When Audrey (Mila Kunis) says about the train station, she is right because Rakoczi tér is a metro station on the fourth green line. This fact fits Budapest, but the events of this part of the film supposedly take place in Vienna. It is interesting to note that the square is only a few blocks distant from one of the locations of Ron Howard’s ‘Inferno’, where Professor Langdon escapes a hospital in a nightgown. 

 

VIENNA TRAIN STATION (VIENNA) 

It is, of course, a mystery just why people who chased Audrey and Morgan failed to control the key terrestrial transport hub of Vienna: the Main Train Station. The movie once again takes us back to Austria for a panorama of the entrance and possibly some interior shots with our heroines. This modern giant railway hub stands on the site of two old stations: ‘Südbahnhof’ and ‘Ostbahnhof’ (South and Eastern railway stations). The whole area was known for this purpose since the 1840s. The current building of Hauptbahnhof was finished in 2012, and it became fully operational in 2015, just two years before the filming of ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’. It is one of the busiest train stations in Europe, with more than 1000 trains and 130,000 passengers arriving or departing daily. 

 

PRAGUE (BUDAPEST) 

After a brief scene with Ukrainian actress Ivanna Sakhno in a Berlin nightclub, the story moves to Prague. Similar to the Vienna opening sequence, twenty minutes before, the movie invests a few seconds in impressing its audience with breathtaking panoramas of the city of Prague, Czech Republic. 

Without unnecessary preludes, ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’ shows us the most recognized landmark of Prague: Charles Bridge, and he does this twice, first at dawn and then apparently in broad daylight, so that there is no longer any doubt about where we are. Charles Bridge is the most important Gothic monument of old Prague and the second-oldest bridge in the country. It was opened back in 1380 and was damaged by floods several times, but prevailed in both nature and wars. 

The panorama over the Charles Bridge then makes space for a less obvious location known as ‘The Castle Stairs’ (Zámecké Schody), a site of one of the most beautiful bird views over Prague. These stairs are only 160 meters and have 230 steps, and the altitude difference between the lowest and highest points is around forty meters. The first stone steps were laid here in the 14th century and were later widened. It is worth noting that the movie used the horizontal reverse shot with the dome of St. Nicholas Church to the left rather than to the right in reality. Zámecké schody should not be confused with ‘Staré zámecké schody’ (Old Castle Stairs) further east. 

Similar to many spy movies, the ‘bad guys’ and, in this case, ‘a bad girl’ have access to highly popular and frequently visited landmarks. Nadezhda, performed by a Ukrainian actress, Ivanna Sakhno, sets her sniper position at the top of the tower, which overlooks the city center of Prague. It is known as ‘Staroměstská Radnice’ (the Old Town Hall) and was built as far back as the 14th century. The tower has a height of 56 meters, and it dominates the main square in the city called Staroměstské náměstí, or ‘The Old Town Square’. Another iconic structure that enters the panorama in the background is another visiting card of Prague called ‘Church of Our Lady before Týn’, also from the 14th century. Back in 1996, the town square made its way to ‘Mission Impossible’ with Tom Cruise, and in 2004, both the square and the church played the role of Paris in ‘Van Helsing’. 

After their supposed arrival in Prague, Audrey and Morgan make a call to Morgan’s parents and take bikes to find an old man called Roger on Karlova Street in the capital of the Czech Republic. There is a brief scene of two girls making a stop at the crossroad, and it was filmed not in Prague but in Budapest at the intersection of Donati and Toldy Ferenc Streets on the Western bank of the Danube. The location is just a few buildings away from Corvin Ter, where heroines previously tried to steal a Jaguar in Vienna. It is also interesting to note that the official trailer to ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’ had an extended version of this scene with the police cars and a wider angle compared to the final variant. In the trailer, we can see the Hungarian national flag on the building to the right, and the girls use yellow bikes typical of Budapest. 

 

PARIS (BUDAPEST) 

Not only Vilius, Los Angeles, Vienna, Prague, and Berlin mainly filmed in Budapest, but Paris also has a small part in the movie thanks to a few Hungarian locations. When Sebastian saves Audrey and Morgan from Nadedja and a couple of criminals in the abandoned gymnasium hall, he supposedly takes the girls to Paris to meet with his MI6 boss (Gillian Anderson) and the CIA agents. The overall shot of the secret headquarters is real, and the address in Paris is 130 rue de Réaumur, though such panoramic shots are generally taken without the involvement of a significant part of a filming crew. 

After speaking with the character of Gillian Anderson, Sebastian opts for the simple task of getting Audrey and Morgan to the Paris airport and getting them back home to Los Angeles. The car leaves the underground parking lot on a ‘Rue Jean-Baptiste’. There is a street of this name in Paris, but the scene was filmed not in France but once again in Budapest. The accessway to the underground parking lot is situated on ‘Szabadság tér’ or ‘Liberty Square’, near the Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation. The square was created in 1886 on the site of the former Austrian army barracks. Nowadays it is remarkable thanks to several buildings and monuments such as the ‘Stock Exchange Palace’, the ‘US Embassy in Hungary’, the old office of the National Bank, the statues of American presidents Ronald Reagan and H.W. Bush, as well as US General Harry Hill Bandholtz (1864-1925). 

A few seconds later, when we see an obelisk and a large monumental building in the background, this view was also shot at Liberty Square from the perspective of Aulich Street in the Southwest direction. The obelisk is the notorious Soviet War Memorial, and the building in the background is ‘Tőzsdepalota’ or ‘Stock Exchange Palace’. Between the inauguration in 1907 and 1948, the building housed the city stock exchange offices, from 1955 to 2009 offices of the Hungarian national public service television company. ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’ is not the only Hollywood production that matched the building. It played the abandoned casino building in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ (the safe house of Harrison Ford’s character in the desert) and in 2022 appeared in a roof chase scene in Marvel’s ‘Black Widow’ with Scarlett Johansson. 

When Audrey confesses that she still possesses the USB drive with secret information, the trio makes their way to the imposing building of the Parisian library. On the internet, you can find the information that Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris was meant in this scene, but the movie shows the front side of another famous building: Petit Palais or ‘Small Palace’. Built at the turn of the XX century, a magnificent building currently hosts the Museum of Fine Arts. Back in 1985, it made a short appearance in ‘European Vacation’ when the Griswolds stopped to buy souvenirs at the crossroad with Petit Palace in the background to the right. The Palace is located close to the famous Pont Alexandre III bridge, known by movie fans thanks to ‘Midnight in Paris’ and ‘Me Before You’. Anyway, the interior scene in the library was shot neither in Bibliothèque Mazarine nor in Petit Palace, but once again in Budapest, inside the Technical University. The University was founded back in 1782, and it is one of the oldest technical educational institutions in Europe. The main building that was used for the interior shots in ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’ was built between 1904 and 1909 on the bank of the Danube. Nowadays, it serves as an educational home for more than 20,000 students and a workplace for 1200 lecturers. 

 

THE BUDAPEST BATHS (BUDAPEST)

While Budapest played different cities in this story, it played itself for one short scene. Followed by a sequence at the library with Sebastian, Audrey, and Morgan, and a call to Edward Snowden, we once again see Nadedja, who survived the explosion of a grenade close to her face. A magnificent building that is seen from the exterior is the famous Vajdahunyad Castle. Located in the city park amid artificial lakes, it was initially built as a temporary pavilion in 1896 to celebrate the 1000th anniversary of the creation of Hungary and was recreated in stone in 1907. The inauguration ceremony was attended by the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph (1830–1916). The castle does not have public baths, which Ivanna Sachno’s character could use for relaxation.