Dubrovnik, Croatia
How nerd-tastic can one city be? Well, in the case of this beautiful and ancient seaside city known as the Pearl of the Adriatic, very. Before The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson sent Finn and Rose there to find a renowned codebreaker in the Canto Bight casino, it was the capital of the seven kingdoms and the Lannister stronghold on HBO’s Game of Thrones where it is the real-world equivalent of King’s Landing.
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Laamu Atoll, Maldives
There was trouble in paradise for the unlikely heroes of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story that falls in between the first two trilogies. Laamu Atoll in the Maldives, a growing honeymoon destination, was the site of the film’s massive final battle, Architectural Digest explains. Director Gareth Edwards, just as George Lucas before him, designed skirmishes with World War II engagements as models. The villains had established a base on the planet of Scarif and were keeping the blueprints for the Death Star there. We think Edwards might have just wanted an excuse to go to South Asia and the breathtaking Indian Ocean. “Scarif is a paradise world so we had to go to paradise to film it,” he said during a panel at the 2016 Star Wars Celebration. He added that they enlisted Maldivian soldiers, who had no idea what Star Wars was, to play Stormtroopers.
Canary Wharf Station, London
This Docklands district Underground station on the Jubilee line opened in 1999 and in 2016, it became another Stormtrooper-filled spot on Scarif in Rogue One according to BuzzFeed. Edwards revealed at the 2016 Star Wars Celebration that the reason he used that particular Tube station was personal. “My first job in television was just around the corner and I used to pass it every day,” Edwards said, “[I thought,] ‘This is something from the future. This is like a sci-fi movie, If I ever do sci-fi in my life, I’m gonna film it here.’ We were trying to figure out how to do these really long shots that involve a lot of running and building big massive sets and we were trying to be clever about it. I was like. ‘Let’s film it at the Docklands.’ They were like, ‘Ha ha ha, very funny.’” But Edwards got to fulfil his dream despite it being a logistical nightmare. They had to wait until the station closed and had to be finished at 4 am when it reopened for commuters. They barely made the deadline. “As we left, everyone wearing suits came in and we were like, ‘Morning, morning.’” It also appeared in 2002 in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.
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