Unchosen: Inside The Filming Locations With Director Jim Loach

In the Fellowship of the Divine, quiet, nurturing women do as they are told, men pray and provide for their families, and no one – no one – has a smart phone. Aside from landline phones and electric kettles, in fact, all technology is banned for its sins. And while many of us crave a digital detox in the British countryside, let us assure you: not like this.

Unchosen centres on married couple Rosie (Molly Windsor) and Adam (Asa Butterfield) alongside their young daughter Grace (Olivia Pickering) inside a seemingly peaceful religious cult, tracing the fall out that occurs following the arrival of outsider, Sam (Fra Fee). Really we should call him an ‘unchosen’ as they do in the series: someone not blessed with a place in the Fellowship. Penned by Julie Gearey, all of this is backdropped by remote British countryside.

Molly Windsor as Rosie & Fra Fee as Sam in Unchosen. (Netflix)

Having cut his teeth on Coronation Street and Waterloo Road, and since made a name for himself directing Victoria (2017), The Tower (2021) and Lockerbie: A Search for Truth (2025), in Unchosen British director Jim Loach turns his attention to this sinister religious sect. ‘Julie and I talked a lot about how the community “live amongst us”, living parallel lives to the rest of the world, with minimal interaction with “outsiders” – the unchosen,’ Loach tells Country & Town House. ‘And also quite substantial amounts of money can wash through their homes and their businesses. That really struck a chord with me.’

When choosing the setting of Unchosen, then, ‘the challenge was to find locations that had a really cinematic scale, and had a familiarity about them, but always with something slightly “off”,’ the director explains. ‘We wanted everywhere to feel a little unsettling, even if it wasn’t always obvious what it might be. That informed a lot of how we approached it from a visual point of view – choice of lenses, locations, framing, everything. We were aiming for a psychological claustrophobia for the characters set on a cinematic landscape. They have the illusion of freedom, but they’re living in a prison of their own making.’

Here’s where the production ended up.

Asa Butterfield as Adam and Fra Fee as Sam in Unchosen. (Netflix)

Where Was Unchosen Filmed?

‘We were primarily in Surrey, and then on a stage at Shepperton,’ director Jim Loach tells C&TH, referring to the famous Surrey film studio. ‘Surrey is a nice area, quite affluent in parts, but we weren’t interested in anything that felt benign. So we chose to shoot the exterior scenes at times of day when the light was low, the shadows long – so you always feel like someone could be listening in, or watching them, unseen in the corner of the frame.

‘I wanted to feel the weather, see the sky – I felt the show should have a timeless look, and a kind of “primal” feel to it,’ Loach continues. ‘It’s not a story that needs tonnes of tech, or modern stuff in it – it’s primarily about the most human dilemmas, dark secrets and desires. It’s from the gut, a bit.’

As for specific locations, the director kept schtum – but venturing into the verdant countryside villages of Surrey, you will find lots of location dupes. Originally titled Out of the Dust, the cast and crew assembled to film Unchosen in Surrey way back in August 2024, wrapping up four months later in December – meaning it has taken just under two years to bring the six-part drama to our screens.

Molly Windsor as Rosie & Fra Fee as Sam in Unchosen. (Netflix)

Despite the claustrophobic intensity of the Fellowship, ‘the overall idea was to give the show a big cinematic scale, and at the same time follow the detail of their psychology’, Loach explains.

Speaking of detail, the production team had such a strong attention to detail that even Windsor and Butterfield’s piercing blue eyes were pivotal in design choices. ‘We always felt that the look of the show should be really distinctive, so everything on camera is by design,’ the director explains. ‘One day we were talking about Molly’s blue eyes, and Asa’s in fact. So we chose a really strict colour palette that kind of pivoted off her eye colour. All the colours in the show come from that thought – the clothes she wears, the colour on the walls, everything. We wanted that kind of uniformity of look, so that the exterior world read like her interior thinking. She has been brought up to obey the rules… Well, until she doesn’t, and then the shit hits the fan of course! The things she moves towards are at odds with her world – like the colour red which we reserved for Sam’s character.’

Fra Fee as Sam in Unchosen. (Netflix)

Soon after we meet Sam, we see the flashbacks he endures – including those at a fish factory. While lead star Windsor cites the ‘really beautiful and peaceful’ woodland location as her favourite from shooting Unchosen, the director references this fish factory. ‘I don’t know if it was a favourite exactly, but the fish factory was an important location,’ Loach says. ‘It introduces the character of Sam, and we wanted to use the symbolism of the fish in a very conscious way in those scenes. They were real fish, and real workers gutting them.

‘It was a bloody, messy, smelly day – pretty challenging…’ the director reflects. ‘But we didn’t want to fake it. Blood and guts improves any scene!’

All six episodes of Unchosen are streaming now on Netflix.

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