Havoc, the new Tom Hardy movie on Netflix, is all about the action.
Written and directed by Gareth Evans, who is best known for his 2011 Indonesian action thriller The Raid, Havoc stars Hardy as a grizzled police detective named Walker with a dark secret, indebted to his city’s corrupt mayor (played by Forest Whitaker). When the mayor’s son gets caught up in a violent gang war, Walker agrees to rescue the kid, in exchange for his freedom.
Also starring Jessie Mei Li, Timothy Olyphant, Luis Guzmán, Justin Cornwell, and Quelin Sepulveda, Havoc absolutely delivers on the bloody, visceral fight scenes that fans of Evans have come to expect. The action is definitely the main draw of the movie—rather than the plot, characters, or setting—but this is still a movie, and it does have those things. In fact, the city where Havoc takes place and the place where Havoc was filmed are two very different things. Read on to learn more about the Havoc filming locations.
Where does the Havoc movie take place?
Netflix’s Havoc movie takes place in a fictional U.S. city. It’s not a real place.
In an interview for the Havoc production notes, director Gareth Evans said they modeled this fictional city after several different cities on the East Coast and Midwest.
“We were looking at areas of Pittsburgh and Detroit, Chicago and New York, and trying to merge them together in a way that feels like America through the prism of cinema,” Evans explained.”This is our own city. And there’s a Triad element to the story, so we came up with a Chinatown and I didn’t want it to feel like the Chinatowns you see in Western cities like London. Let’s take a look at the old walled city vibe. We went a little mythic in our world-build.”
Where was the 2025 Havoc movie filmed?
For the most part, Havoc was filmed in a studio in Cardiff, Wales, on movie sets. Though the film takes place in an unnamed city in the United States, director Gareth Evans is from Wales, and wanted to shoot a little closer to home.
The big fight scene in a fishing shack/cabin at the end of the movie was filmed on three different sets that were built special for the film. In that same press notes interview, Evans explained that the sets were modified to allow the camera crew to get up close to the action.
“We built three fishing shacks in total,” Evans said. “We had one where we could go underneath floorboards, so we needed that very high, and raised on a stage. We had another one inside the stage, where we could do the majority of our fight stuff.”
One of those shacks was built on location, in the Welsh countryside of Merthyr Mawr, for the exterior parts of the fight.
Other on-location filming for Havoc includes one of the film’s final scenes, when Hardy confronts Timothy Olyphant’s character on the train tracks. According to producer Ed Talfan in the movie’s production notes, that sequence was filmed in Baglan, near Port Talbot, “on the train track sidings in the shadow of the steelworks.”
There is also a set piece which required the production to shut down part of the Cardiff Bay. “It’s been a step into a bigger experience, and we’ve had amazing support from Netflix,” Talfan said in that same interview. “To be able to take something of this scale to Wales is hugely exciting. We’ve had a lot of support from the Welsh government, and with councils across South Wales.”
But as for that exciting car chase that opens the film, the majority of that was all created digitally, which Evans directed using a virtual reality headset. “The truck chase required seven or eight days of filming at night,” Talfan explained. “And from a continuity point of view, none of those nights might match. So as soon as Gareth went in and put the VR headset on and went into a virtual space with a virtual camera and choreographed a car chase in a virtual space, it was a real penny-drop moment. The freedom it gives the filmmaker is astonishing.”
