Honey Filming Locations: Where the BBC’s Killing Eve Prequel Was Shot
The BBC's Killing Eve prequel never went to Berlin. Vilnius, Kaunas and Klaipėda play the East German capital in 1982. Here is where the series was shot, and why.
Honey was filmed entirely in Lithuania. Vilnius, Kaunas and Klaipėda stand in for East Berlin in 1982, and the shoot ran for about five months, from October 2025 to March 2026.
The six-part drama is a prequel to Killing Eve. It starts on Saturday, November 14, at 9 p.m. on BBC One and iPlayer. Ann Skelly plays Martha Schmitt, a young MI6 officer working under deep cover, alongside Rory Kinnear, Nate Mann and Jannis Niewöhner.
Honey filming locations at a glance
- Vilnius: 57 filming days, in the Naujamiestis and Lazdynai districts, at the Palace of Culture, Entertainment and Sports and at the Cooperative Union building.
- Kaunas: Laisvės Avenue and nearby streets, in November 2025.
- Klaipėda: the port city on the Baltic Sea, chosen for its German look.
- Palanga: named by the Vilnius Film Office, with no further detail.
- Studios: many of the interiors, plus a set on a Vilnius industrial estate.
Why Lithuania and not Berlin?
Berlin itself was not an option. Broadcast magazine, which visited the set, reported that the city is now expensive and no longer looks as it did 45 years ago. The producers remembered Lithuania from a scouting trip for the 2005 Daniel Craig drama Archangel.
Producer Christopher Hall told the Vilnius Film Office that the country offered varied locations, tax incentives and skilled crews. Of the 145 people on the crew, 130 were Lithuanian. The British company brought only a small team, plus German costume and art specialists who knew the East Berlin of the period.
Vilnius: 57 days as East Berlin
Most of the series was shot in the capital. The Vilnius Film Office names the districts of Naujamiestis and Lazdynai and the Vilnius Palace of Culture, Entertainment and Sports among the locations. Hall said the production used it as a large bridal shop and also as secret police offices, interrogation rooms and corridors.
Location manager Jonas Špokas says the Palace is one of the Soviet-era locations his team values most. In an interview with The Location Guide he also singled out the Cooperative Union building, known as KOOP. It is a piece of Soviet modernism from the 1970s and 1980s, with a large staircase that runs to the eighth floor, and he said it worked very well for Honey.
Not everything was a real building. When Broadcast’s reporter visited in March, a scene set in a CIA safe house was being filmed on an industrial estate in Vilnius. Many other interiors were shot in studios.
Kaunas: Laisvės Avenue
In November 2025 the production filmed in Kaunas. The city’s municipality reported that filming was taking place that week on Laisvės Avenue and in nearby streets. Vintage cars drove along the avenue, and a well-known pharmacy was turned into a 1980s East Berlin wedding dress shop.
Hall said Kaunas was chosen for its architecture from the years between the two world wars. Dressing a whole avenue for the period, he said, was “something we could hardly do anywhere else in the world”.
Klaipėda and Palanga
Klaipėda supplied the most German streets. Špokas describes it as probably the most German-looking of Lithuania’s cities and one that has rarely been used on screen. Broadcast notes that the city, on the Baltic Sea, is known as Little Germany.
The Vilnius Film Office also lists the seaside town of Palanga among the locations. The location manager’s own account mentions only Vilnius, Kaunas and Klaipėda, so what was filmed in Palanga is not on record. In total, about 15 filming days were spent outside the capital.
A winter shoot at minus 20
The production got real snow, and plenty of it. Hall told Broadcast that the second block of filming brought the heaviest snow Vilnius had seen in 15 years, and that the crew worked in temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius. He woke one morning to find the river outside his apartment frozen.
Then the thaw came in the final week. To keep scenes matching, the production brought in clean snow scraped from the city’s ice rinks. The rinks did not charge for it, but the crew had to supply the trucks.
Can you visit the Honey filming locations?
- Laisvės Avenue is a public street in the centre of Kaunas.
- Naujamiestis and Lazdynai are districts of Vilnius.
- The Palace of Culture, Entertainment and Sports is a working building. Špokas says orchestras, dance studios and music classes use it.
- Klaipėda is a port city on Lithuania’s Baltic coast.
Who made Honey?
Honey comes from Sid Gentle Films, the company behind Killing Eve, working with Lithuania’s Baltic Film Services. Emma Moran is the lead writer, Toby MacDonald and Michelle Savill directed, and the BBC made it with the German broadcaster ZDF. According to Broadcast, Martha Schmitt is an alias: the character is the young Carolyn Martens, played in Killing Eve by Fiona Shaw.
More guides: FilmiFeed filming locations.
