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.
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 Gray 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 saw 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 anchor shows itself in stunning vistas, beautiful locations, and a lot of rivers and forests.
