Where was Interior Chinatown filmed?
The Hulu series shot primarily on the Universal Pictures backlot in Los Angeles, with additional filming in real LA Chinatown, Toronto, and New Zealand.
The series filmed almost entirely in the Los Angeles area, relying on studio backlots to construct the fictional Chinatown at its center rather than dressing a real neighborhood. The Universal Pictures backlot in Universal City supplied the main studio space, with additional on-location work in Los Angeles’s actual Chinatown district. The production also traveled to Toronto and New Zealand for supplementary material. Principal photography was underway by February 2023 and wrapped before August 2023, according to production records cited by Wikipedia.
Studio Backlots in Los Angeles
The Universal Pictures backlot in Universal City, California, is the physical foundation of Interior Chinatown’s constructed world. Production crews converted the lot’s New York Street standing set into the show’s version of Chinatown, building a tiered gate flanked by lion statues from scratch and dressing the surrounding streets with period vehicles, signage, and costumes, according to location reporting by The Cinemaholic. The Wall Street backlot, a separate standing set on the same Universal lot, served as the location for scenes requiring police cordons and crime scene exteriors, including footage involving detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet) and Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang).
The Fox Studio Lot at 10201 West Pico Boulevard in Century City also hosted interior filming, according to the same secondary source.
Chinatown, Los Angeles: On-Location Filming
Real streets in the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles supplemented the backlot construction. Production notes cited by Wikipedia confirm the crew worked in the actual Chinatown district, though no primary source identifies the specific blocks or intersections used.
How the Golden Palace Was Built
The interior set of the Golden Palace Restaurant, where Willis works as a waiter, drew its design references from a different coast entirely. According to The New York Times, which published a piece about the show’s sets in November 2024, the production modeled the Golden Palace on Doyers Street and its underground tunnel network in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Doyers Street is a compact, sharply curved block in lower Manhattan with a long history in American crime writing about Chinatown: the street’s tight angle earned it the nickname ‘Bloody Angle’ during the tong conflicts of the early twentieth century. Nom Wah Tea Parlor, which has described itself as Chinatown’s oldest continuously operating restaurant, sits on the same block.
Our reading is that referencing a Manhattan landmark for a story nominally set in a fictional Los Angeles neighborhood is coherent with the show’s premise, which treats Chinatown as a construction assembled from images rather than from a lived place.
Toronto and New Zealand
Wikipedia, drawing on two separate sources published during the 2023 production period, confirms that the series also shot in Toronto’s Chinatown districts and in New Zealand. The specific scenes filmed in those locations, and their scale relative to the Los Angeles work, are not detailed in any primary source available to FilmiFeed.
An earlier version of this article published by FilmiFeed categorized both Toronto and New Zealand as unverified rumors. That characterization is not consistent with what Wikipedia’s cited production sources record.
Cast, Creators, and How the Series Came Together
Interior Chinatown is a comedy drama created by Charles Yu, adapting his own National Book Award-winning novel of the same name. Yu serves as showrunner. Taika Waititi directed the pilot and is an executive producer. 20th Television produced the series with Rideback and Participant, with Dan Lin and Lindsey Liberatore serving as executive producers. The score is by Mark Mothersbaugh and Nick Lee, and the series incorporates Cantopop songs including works by Sam Hui, Ricky Hui, and Frances Yip.
Jimmy O. Yang plays Willis Wu, a waiter at the Golden Palace who gradually comes to understand he is a background character inside a fictional television police procedural called Black and White. Investigating his brother Jonathan’s (Chris Pang) twelve-year-old disappearance pulls him deeper into family secrets and the machinery behind the fictional world he inhabits. Ronny Chieng plays Fatty Choi, Willis’s best friend and co-worker. Sullivan Jones and Lisa Gilroy play detectives Miles Turner and Sarah Green, colleagues of Lana Lee in the fictional city of Port Harbor. Archie Kao plays Golden Palace owner Uncle Wong. Diana Lin plays Willis’s mother Lily Wu, with Tzi Ma in a recurring role as his father Joe Wu. Lauren Tom plays Betty Chan, a realtor and the mother of Willis’s childhood friend Audrey (Annie Chang).
The ten-episode first season premiered on Hulu on November 19, 2024, and streamed internationally on Disney+.
Knowing that the Golden Palace was designed around a Manhattan street, and that the Chinatown exterior was constructed on a backlot from scratch, makes the production’s physical choices read as something beyond logistics. Our reading is that the show was built the same way its fictional Chinatown was: from pieces of other people’s images of the place, assembled into something that functions as real on screen.
