Where Was Cold Pursuit Filmed? Thriller's Filming Location Explained

The 2019 action thriller film Cold Pursuit stars Liam Neeson as a man seeking revenge for the murder of his son. Where was the movie filmed?

Summary

"Cold Pursuit" takes place in the fictional town of Kehoe, Colorado, but was primarily filmed in Alberta, Canada, due to its similarities in snowy, mountainous conditions.
British Columbia, Canada, was also chosen as a filming location, with Vancouver serving as one of the primary cities for filming.
Norway was potentially used as a filming location, although it is unclear which scenes were captured there. The choice makes sense, given the snowy setting and the director's ties to the country.

The title of Cold Pursuit does not bury the lede regarding the story's setting — it takes place in the snowy terrain of Colorado in the United States, but the movie's production was located a little farther north. The 2019 action thriller film stars Liam Neeson as Nels Coxman, a snowplow driver who works at a ski resort, and revolves around Nels' revenge plot following the murder of his son by a drug cartel. So, similar to some of Neeson's other action movies (like the Taken franchise), his character takes on a vigilante role to seek vengeance for his loved one.

Aside from Neeson as the film's protagonist, the cast of Cold Pursuit includes Liam Neeson as Nels Coxman, Tom Bateman as Trevor "Viking" Calcote, Tom Jackson as White Bull Legrew, Emmy Rossum as Kim Dash, Domenick Lombardozzi as Mustang, Julia Jones as Aya, John Doman as John "Gip" Gipsky, Laura Dern as Grace, Aleks Paunovic as Detective Osgard, William Forsythe as Brock "Wingman" Coxman, and Arnold Pinnock as Leighton "The Eskimo" Deeds. These cast members and the film's production crew traveled to a handful of locations to capture the revenge story in the action-packed movie, and the various towns easily doubled as places in Colorado.

Alberta, Canada

Although Cold Pursuit, directed by Hans Petter Moland, technically takes place in Kehoe, Colorado, the cast and crew traveled north to film the 2019 action thriller. Kehoe is a fictional town that screenwriter Frank Baldwin created for the purposes of the movie, so they evidently couldn't film scenes in a made-up city. The producers settled on Canada as their primary filming location since it could perfectly duplicate the snowy, mountainous conditions in Colorado. Plus, numerous Hollywood productions often shoot their projects in Canada because it is cheaper to film them in the northern country rather than in the United States.

So, the cast and crew of Cold Pursuit went off to Canada, and they stopped in the province of Alberta to capture several significant mountainous scenes. According to The Cinemaholic, these sequences were filmed in Kananaskis Country in Calgary, home to the Canadian Rocky Mountains. So, while the mountains in the movie are supposed to be a part of the Colorado Rockies, they are located in Canada. The production team specifically utilized Gusty Peak and the Fortress, two distinguishable ranges in the northern Rockies. Other filming locations in Alberta included the Spray Valley Provincial Park and the Fairmont Château Lake Louise hotel.

British Columbia, Canada

Cold Pursuit's production team also chose British Columbia, Canada, as a filming location. British Columbia is a hotspot for numerous movie and television show productions nowadays, so it's not surprising to learn that the producers of the action thriller picked the province for principal photography. Of course, some scenes were captured in Vancouver (one of the most popular cities in the film industry). The Vancouver filming locations were the Eppich House II (which doubled as the cartel leader's house in the movie), the Bourbon Bar (aka the Blizzard Bar in Cold Pursuit), the City Centre Motor Hotel, the former Canada Post Building, the Waterfall Building, and Lord Byng Secondary School.

The town of Fernie, British Columbia, doubled as Kehoe, Colorado, and the Fernie Alpine Resort was used as the setting for the ski resort in the 2019 feature film. So, when viewers are watching the movie, the exterior of the Kehoe ski resort is, in reality, a lodge located in Fernie, British Columbia, Canada. Additionally, the cast and crew of Cold Pursuit traveled to a couple of other cities in the province, including Victoria, where they shot scenes at the Fairmont Empress Hotel, and New Westminster, where they captured a fight sequence at Lisa's Bridal Salon.

Cold Pursuit Review: Liam Neeson Delivers Decent Thrills

Cold Pursuit makes for an entertaining subversion of Neeson's previous action roles, but the story gets dragged down in its larger ambitions.

Norway

While the majority of filming took place in Canada, many reports (including the aforementioned article from The Cinemaholic) claim that Norway was also utilized as a principal photography location for Cold Pursuit. It's unclear which scenes were captured in the Scandinavian country. But the destination was undoubtedly a wise choice, given the movie's snowy setting, and perhaps the crew only traveled to Norway to get exterior shots. Funnily enough, Cold Pursuit is a remake of the 2014 Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance (known as Kraftidioten in Norway), which was also directed by Hans Petter Moland.