Where Was Animals Filmed? The Real Los Angeles Behind Ben Affleck’s Thriller
The Netflix thriller stayed close to home, taking its cameras from a familiar market to the Los Angeles River.
Ben Affleck and Steven Yeun took a fictional mayoral campaign to the Original Farmers Market in Los Angeles, filming amid its busy food stalls.
Animals was filmed in and around Los Angeles, the same city in which its kidnapping story takes place. Affleck directs and plays Mark Kimball, a candidate for mayor whose son is abducted. Kerry Washington plays Mark’s wife, Abigail. Their attempt to raise the ransom is the engine of a thriller arriving on Netflix and in select theaters on October 9, 2026.
The Original Farmers Market: a real campaign stop
SWNS footage places Affleck and Yeun at the market on April 15, 2025. They walk through the site handing out campaign leaflets. The recording also catches Affleck posing for photographs with people who recognized him, separate from the campaign action being filmed.
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The location is specific: the Original Farmers Market at 6333 West Third Street, at Fairfax Avenue. This is the permanent market, open daily, rather than a temporary weekly gathering of farmers’ trucks. Its mix of food counters, grocers and shops gives visitors a reason to stay beyond taking a quick photograph.
Keeping the shoot in Los Angeles was a deliberate production choice. Netflix says the producers wanted to support local film jobs as well as use the city as part of the story. The movie comes from Artists Equity, the studio Affleck founded with Matt Damon and Gerry Cardinale, with Affleck also serving as a co-writer.
The market had a Hollywood life long before Animals
The owners trace the market’s beginnings to July 1934, when a dozen farmers and other merchants began selling from trucks on the Gilmore property. Permanent stalls followed within months. The land had already served as a dairy farm and an oil field, making this one corner a compact piece of Los Angeles history.
The familiar clock tower became a market landmark in 1948. Entertainment history runs through the site too: the market’s archive records stars working behind its counters for a Red Cross fundraiser in 1936, with Shirley Temple drawing a crowd at Brock’s Candies. Later productions included Entourage and television segments featuring Alton Brown and Gordon Ramsay.
The Los Angeles River and the storm-drain shoot
An April 2025 report from What’s on Netflix includes Backgrid photographs and on-set video of a substantial action sequence in the Los Angeles storm-drain system. Its image captions identify Affleck and Luis Gerardo Mendez during filming at the LA River. The river shoot supplies a sharp visual contrast with the busy market: broad concrete infrastructure instead of crowded food stalls.
The report identifies the river but does not name the precise tunnel entrance or crossing. No public address has been confirmed for that sequence.
The river itself is far larger than a single recognizable concrete channel. LA County’s river master plan describes a 51-mile route from Canoga Park to Long Beach, crossing a patchwork of communities. Its planning history also explains why flood management remains central to any discussion of access and recreation along the corridor.
A practical visit after the movie
Check individual merchant hours before traveling, and leave room for the people doing their shopping.
For the river, the seasonal access rules matter more than the movie itinerary. The Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority announced that the Elysian Valley and Sepulveda Basin recreation zones closed on September 27, 2026. It lists Memorial Day 2027 as their planned reopening. Those are recreation-zone notices, not permission to enter a drainage tunnel or production access road.
A river photograph is best taken from a lawful public viewpoint. Follow the signs and current local access notices rather than attempting to reproduce an action setup. A crew working in flood-control infrastructure has arrangements that an ordinary visitor does not.
What about the Kimballs’ house?
Netflix has not identified the Kimball residence or published a complete list of interiors.
Featured photograph: The Los Angeles River, shown in a location photograph. The exact stretch used by the production has not been identified. Photo: Downtowngal, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
