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Gun battles, secret passageways, revolutionary Paris barricades, exploding Oxford colleges, dastardly plots. Yes, Sherlock Holmes is back. The Guy Ritchie version.
Ritchie is exec-producer and one of the directors on Prime Video’s action-packed new period caper Young Sherlock – adapted from Andrew Lane’s book series – and it’s a show hopped-up on the Lock, Stock man’s trademark verve and punky energy.
This is not the tweedy, cerebral Holmes of Jeremy Brett and Basil Rathbone, or even the studious teenage sleuth of Barry Levinson’s ’80s adventure movie Young Sherlock Holmes. Like a 19-year-old version of Robert Downey Jr’s version of the great detective in Ritchie’s two Sherlock Holmes movies, this Holmes is socking it to the villains – literally.
‘We wanted to take the energy of those original films and bring it into a younger version,’ Young Sherlock production designer Tom Burton tells Time Out. ‘I looked at them as a spring-off point for the design. Guy's kinetic energy is present in both. We wanted it to feel like the same world, even if it's a completely different story.’
Burton talks us through how – and where – Sherlock Holmes’s posh-but-perilous Victorian world came together in the new eight-part show.
What is Young Sherlock about?
After a spell in London’s Newgate Prison for pickpocketing, the young Sherlock Holmes is packed off to Oxford – not as an undergrad but as a dogsbody for the porters at Magdalene College. There he encounters roguishly charming Irishman James Moriarty (The Wheel of Time’s Dónal Finn) and witnesses the university’s population of stuffy old dons dwindling violently – possibly at the hands of a mysterious Chinese princess, Gulun Shou'an (3 Body Problem’s Zine Tseng).
Meanwhile, Sherlock’s mother Cordelia (Natascha McElhone), committed to an asylum since her daughter drowned, is experiencing a strange sense of being watched. Could these seemingly unconnected mysteries be, well, connected? And can Holmes and Moriarty get to the bottom of them before someone bumps them off? The game is afoot! Even if no one’s putting it like that yet…
Who stars in Young Sherlock?
Alongside its two young stars is Fiennes’s uncle, Joseph, who plays Sherlock’s dad Silas Holmes, a self-styled scientist, explorer and entrepreneur, and The Riot Club’s Max Irons who plays his more cautious elder brother Mycroft.
Colin Firth is the prickly but well-connected Oxford dean Sir Bucephalus Hodge, a hostile presence for Mycroft and Moriarty alike. Turkish-German actor Numan Acar (Spider-Man: Far From Home) is the mysterious and dangerous Esad Kasgarli, who is almost certainly not in Oxford for the sightseeing. And if you’re here for Inspector Lestrade’s origin story, you’re in luck too: Line of Duty’s Scott Reid plays the tenacious but leaden-footed Scotland Yard detective.
Where was Young Sherlock filmed?
221b Baker Street was Queen Square in Bristol
Bristol stands in for 1800s London in the show, including Baker Street itself. The elegant Georgian surrounds of Queen Square recently doubled for London in Netflix’s Seven Dials Mystery and repeats the trick here. ‘We shot one side of it because we couldn't reveal that it was a square,’ says Burton. ‘It was the beginning of the first episode when Mycroft jumps in the carriage. We were leapfrogging locations with The Seven Dials Mystery and Down Cemetery Road. Bristol was a very busy location last year!’
The Baker Street bathroom was filmed at Bristol’s Georgian House Museum
This Bristol museum is furnished and displayed as a typical English town house of the Georgian period – which made it a handy setting for a long Sherlock soak. ‘We used it for when Sherlock is in the bath in Baker Street,’ says Burton, ‘and we used the downstairs as one of the professor's houses where the princess sneaks in’.
Sherlock Holmes’s family home was shot at Llanvihangel Court in Wales
The series opens a flashback to the childhood loss of Holmes’s sister, seemingly drowned in the river at the foot of the family’s garden. The family home, which plays a prominent role later in the show, is actually this privately-owned country pile in Monmouthshire. ‘It had the right amount of gothicness [and] romance,’ explains Burton. ‘The river wasn't there – that was a handy bit of VFX.’ In a stroke of bad luck, a freak storm washed away the garden Burton’s team had created for the series. ‘My set decorator phoned me going: “I think we're in trouble here.” The owners hadn’t had a flood like it since the 1950s.’
The carriage ambush was filmed in Wales’s Margam Country Park
In the first episode, Princess Gulun Shou’an’s carriage is ambushed by a robbers looking for a rare manuscript. The scene was filmed in a park to the north of Cardiff. ‘If you'd looked to the left when we were shooting you would have seen all the steelworks,’ laughs Burton.
Sherlock’s Oxford college was filmed at Magdalen College
Oxford, of course, played a key role in the series, with filming at Magdalen College during the summer holidays. A new porters lodge, where Sherlock is sent to work, was built on the college quad. ‘The real porters were sad when it came down,’ says Burton. ‘They wanted to keep it.’ The scenes of Firth’s Bucephalus Hodge lording over the college dining room was shot in the actual Magdalen refectory, and the church at Magdalen appears too. ‘We shot a really nice cobbled back street for kind of comings and goings,’ Burton says of the production’s two weeks in Oxford.
Oxford’s Bodleian Library played itself in the series
‘It was great to be able to shoot in the real Bodleian Library,’ says Burton. ‘That amazing wooden panelled room where the college professor is doing his algebra lecture is underneath the library.’
The 19th century interiors were built at Great Point Studios in Cardiff
Everything from Oxford college rooms to Parisian catacombs and Turkish mineshafts were constructed on three soundstages at the Cardiff studio. The production designer compares matching the real-world exteriors with soundstage interiors to ‘a big jigsaw puzzle’. A portion of Oxford’s Bodleian Library had to be replicated on set to match shots of Sherlock in the real library. ‘We replicated part of the library with a window that we could break, book stacks to climb, and a secret passageway. Hopefully no one notices!’
Cordelia Holmes’s hospital was filmed at The Rolls of Monmouth
‘The psychiatric hospital was in a place called Rolls of Monmouth,’ says Burton. ‘It used to be Rolls of Rolls-Royce's house – a big Victorian pile that Rolls built and now it's a golf club. We also used its courtyard as our prison laundry and for when Sherlock and Moriarty get into a fight in a fancy Oxford party. I wanted the texture to be quite different to the rest of the show.’
The village in China is actually the Brecon Beacons
Princess Shou'an’s remote Chinese village was filmed in the slightly less vast expanse of Wales’ Brecon Beacons. ‘We added a few extra VFX mountains,’ notes Burton.
Cadiz, Spain stood in revolutionary Paris
In the final episodes, the story takes Holmes Jr and Moriarty to revolutionary Paris in pursuit of a deadly McGuffin. The real 1871 Paris? Cadiz in Andalusia. ‘Originally, we were going to shoot in Barcelona but Cadiz [worked best] with our barricades and everything that’s going on [in those scenes].’
The Alcázar in Jerez stood in for Istanbul
From the turmoil of Paris’s catacombs and revolutionary communes the plot takes us to the palaces and marketplaces of Istanbul – well, Constantinople. This fortified Moorish castle, first built in the 11th century, stands in for the Turkish metropolis.
Silas’s house in Istanbul was Seville’s Casa De Pilatos
Presumably utilising the 19th century equivalent of Airbnb, Joseph Fiennes’ Silas Holmes holes up in a grand Constantinople palace in episode 7. The actual palace? This glorious Andalusian palace dating back to 1483.
The mines sequence was filmed in Spain’s Minas de Riotinto
The climactic sequence goes full Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom as our plucky heroes (and villains) take to the mines of Turkey for a final face-off. And the location is just as remarkable in real life. ‘We changed the script to match the historic mines that we found,’ says Burton, ‘[which are] the Rio Tinto mines about an hour from Seville’. This extra-terrestrial landscape has been mined for more than 5000 years.
Where can I watch Young Sherlock?
All eight episodes are streaming on Prime Video now.
Is there a trailer?
Yes, and you can watch it below.
Young Sherlock soundtrack: the full tracklist for Guy Ritchie’s high-energy sleuthing caper.