Vigil series 3: where was it filmed? Suranne Jones says there were reindeer outside the breakfast room
The BBC thriller has spent two series faking its settings convincingly — a nuclear submarine, then a Middle Eastern desert. For the third, the production stopped faking it.
Series 3 sends DCI Amy Silva and DI Kirsten Longacre to an Arctic research station to investigate the death of a British special forces officer on a covert operation, with rare earth metals and Arctic resource competition underneath the case. The exteriors were shot in Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago roughly midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, with the unit based around Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen. Filming started there in September 2025.
What Svalbard involves
Suranne Jones has described the shoot as unlike anything the show had attempted, including sailing on a working ship toward glaciers and filming in mountain locations well outside the tourist circuit.
"There were reindeer outside the breakfast room every morning, we got to drive the snow buggies, and we really had to layer up," Jones said in 2026.
She and Rose Leslie both talked about access as the selling point.
"Rose and I felt like we were just on top of the world because we went to places that tourists don't normally visit," Jones said.
The Scottish half
Not all of it is Arctic. Glasgow does the heavy lifting for interiors and the mainland scenes, as it has since series 1, with location work in the West End and along West Princes Street. Vigil is a World Productions show and has stayed a Scottish production throughout, whatever the story says the map is doing.
What's different from series 1 and 2
The show's setting record is the reason the Svalbard trip stands out:
- Series 1 (2021) — HMS Vigil, a Vanguard-class submarine, built and shot on soundstages in Scotland.
- Series 2 (2023) — Wudyan, a fictional Middle Eastern state, filmed largely in Scotland and Morocco.
- Series 3 (2026) — an Arctic research station, filmed in the actual Arctic.
Creator Tom Edge, who returns as writer, has said the location choice grew out of rare earth metals and the geopolitical scramble that comes with them — which is the kind of premise that loses something if the ice is sprayed on.
The cast list around it
Jones and Leslie return as Silva and Longacre. The new intake is built around the setting: Jeppe Beck Laursen as Henrik Becken, Governor of Svalbard; Naomi Yang as microbiologist Shen Jia; Steven Cree as Gordon Laity, Minister of State for Energy and Green Transition; Tornike Gogrichiani as Colonel Fyodor.
Six episodes, BBC One and iPlayer, premiering August 30, 2026 and finishing September 14 — a compressed run across three weekends rather than the usual six weeks. The BBC recommissioned the series back in February 2025, before a frame of the Arctic material existed.
Previously we wrote: What Jonty did in Blue Lights — the full list
