There’s Virgin River the show: a cozy, soapy drama about finding true love and learning life lessons along the way. There’s Virgin River the cast of characters: a traumatized, beautiful nurse practitioner who just rolled into town, a hunky bartender with baggage, a meddling town mayor. Then there’s Virgin River the place: an absolutely stunning series of interiors, exteriors, dense forests, waterfalls, mountain vistas and more. The environment of Virgin River looms so breathtakingly large, it often feels like more than just a location — it’s the story, it’s a character, and it’s a reason to keep coming back to the show.
After pressing play on Season 7 the gorgeous setting may have you wondering: Where is Virgin River filmed? Like so many other productions, the show takes place in the United States — Northern California, specifically — but is actually shot in Vancouver, British Columbia and its surrounding mountainous areas.
One of the key people behind Virgin River’s scenery is a location manager and scout named W. Robert “Fluffy” Millar, LMGI. He’s been in the location scouting industry since 1997, and over the years, he’s secured spots for scenes in dozens of films and television series, including A Dog’s Way Home, Shooter, and the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy — all of which were also shot in Vancouver.
“Just living in B.C. and being here and seeing beautiful locations, I always take a picture,” he told Tudum from the set of the show in 2022. “Luckily, with the geo-tagging on phone photographs, if I see something really cool, I can just go click, take a picture of it, and then a year down the road I could be just like, ‘Oh, there was that one spot that was near Vernon and the Okanagan.’”
While on location filming Season 5 of the show, Millar talked to Tudum about the spoils of British Columbia, the often logistically challenging prospect of filming on the sides of mountains, and what happened when the crew learned that Mel’s (Alexandra Breckenridge) cabin, one of the core locations in Virgin River, and the first one we see in Season 1, was sinking into the ground.
At a high level, what’s it like to be a location scout for Virgin River, a show that relies so heavily on its environment to tell the story?
It's about beautiful people in troubled circumstances in beautiful locations. I’m always trying to one-up each episode, always trying to find a prettier, more stunning vista, or another easily accessible, dense forest, and it’s quite a blessing to be doing a show like this in British Columbia. We always coordinate with the First Nations themselves. The Squamish Nation has been really supportive of our show because we do a lot of filming on First Nations land. Because the show is so popular and has an overall positive message, we've developed a really great relationship.
There are obviously a lot of moving parts and an extreme amount of coordination, scheduling and logistics that go into your job. Could you give us an idea of what the process looks like?
I myself do a little bit of the scouting, but I have this amazing young woman who’s been a scout for a few seasons now. Her name is Sarah Whitlam, and that's all she does — professional location scouting. She's also a photographer and her photographs are stunning. She has a fantastic memory of the area of Greater Vancouver we call the Lower Mainland and it's everything from downtown city stuff to ski resorts within 25 minutes of each other.
The process really starts with the words on the page. We provide as many physical options for every location that's scripted. It’s a creative hat I get to wear — knowing the script and knowing that the show anchors itself in stunning vistas, beautiful locations, and a lot of rivers and forests.
What sort of direction or guidance do you get when it comes time to find the perfect spot for a scene? Is there a “style guide” for what you’re looking for? Is it more “find some super high trees” or is it more “find a place that matches the emotion of this scene”?
There's never any direction to try to evoke an emotional response from the environment, because that's on the writers and the actors, but they want our locations team to provide the environment within which the actors can then feel a certain way. It’s not so much the trees as a style guide, it's just the pure, raw beauty — vistas or places where the background behind the actors could steal the attention away for a few seconds from the storyline. People go, “Oh my god, where’s that waterfall?”
What’s an example of a logistically complicated location?
We did the Lumberjack Games episode in Season 3 at Grouse Mountain. It was right during COVID, so the ski mountains were shut down [to the public]. There are actually logger sports and lumberjack games held in this area, but those were also [shut] down because of COVID. Luckily the producer of those [local] lumberjack games lives in the interior of British Columbia. He brought his team up — the kind of stunt people who know all about log rolling and ax throwing and everything. We decided to use gondolas and shipped [all the equipment] up the mountains in the gondolas from the bottom of the hill.
And then once you had your equipment up the mountain, you were able to shoot the scene?
Of course, we had a horrible windstorm that blew over a bunch of our sets on the long weekend before filming. We had to get the team up there first thing in the morning after Canadian Thanksgiving to rebuild a bunch of the locations. We repaired stuff as we worked our way around the mountain. And then the weekend before we were coming in to wrap all the cable and all the grip gear and all the locations gear and everything. They had a massive dump of snowfall that crushed all of our sets and all of our equipment.
One of the primary locations in the show is Mel’s cabin. What can you tell us about that?
The interior, of course, is on a soundstage. They use big photographic backdrops hanging from the ceiling, so when you’re inside and look out the window, it’s actually high-resolution photos taken of the area around the real cabin. It’s a beautiful little park with tennis courts and running trails and a pond on it with turtles and stuff. Last year we were almost at risk of not being able to go there because right adjacent to it is a massive British Columbia hydro substation, which is kind of your PGE [Pacific Gas and Electric Company, in the United States]. They were upgrading it, so we had all these logistical challenges. We also found out last year that the District of North Vancouver received a heritage grant to refurbish the cabin, because it's actually sinking. The foundation is actually sinking into the soft earth by the water table with the pond that's right beside it. They actually need to come in and do an actual house lifting, like those proper things you see on Discovery Channel where they lift a house up and jack it up.
So did that affect your plans for Season 5, which is filming as we speak?
We’re not shooting at the cabin because it’s offline for this lifting to occur. But we actually thought we lost the cabin last year — they couldn’t get it done in time for the summer season. So [instead of it being a surprise] we went back knowing the [construction] was coming down the pike. We went back [last year] and did about a half a day’s worth of establishing shots with the techno crane and drone. We tried to mix and match as many day and night shots as we could, knowing there was a chance we wouldn’t be able to shoot there [for Season 5].
What’s the story with Jack’s Bar, another central location in the show?
Jack's Bar is at this great little restaurant on the river in Squamish called the Watershed Grill. It’s always been popular. It's a great destination — it’s near the largest concentration of bald eagles in the world, where they come to eat and feed and mate. And we always just shoot the exterior on the dike by the river at Jack's Bar. And the thing that I always find so funny is when you look at it from the river, when you see the drone shots of Jack's Bar or the establishing shots, you can't see too many trees, as if you're looking toward the back of the bar and it looks kind of narrow. But then when you cut to the interior of Jack's Bar, that's on our soundstage. And all of a sudden you realize [there’s] a big fireplace and a billiards table and a long bar, and then wait a minute, there's a staircase that goes up to where Brie's room is. But when you look at it on the dike, there's no second floor.
You’re spoiled for choice in terms of beautiful locations in this show — are you partial to any in particular?
There’s an episode in Season 3 when Jack’s Marine buddies come to town and he gets drunk and is going to throw himself in the river and go kayaking. This was just south of Whistler in an area called House Rock. Using my phone GPS with my camera strapped around my neck, I trudged through thick bush to get access to the river, because I stupidly missed the sign for the actual trail system. I was on a forest service road, and [at one point] I was going over a bridge and I saw a river, and it looked awesome, and I tried to figure out how to get there. [When I did] I was like, “Holy smokes, what is this?” There was super-easy access to a beautiful rock outcropping that took you right out to these rapids. Coming across that spot and then having production decide to use it and watching the final edit, I was really proud of how that scene turned out.
Virgin River Season 7 is now streaming on Netflix.
