The incredible transformation of the Costa del Sol in new Netflix blockbuster that will premiere in August

Francisco Griñán

Malaga

Wednesday, 17 July 2024, 17:34

It was one of those productions whose shooting was going to attract attention wherever it went, even if Netflix did its very best to go unnoticed. After all, a crew of several hundred people is hard to conceal, and they were joined by the likes of Hollywood star Jeff Goldblum. This was an exclusive shoot in Spain with headquarters in Malaga city, months of filming and even a subsequent re-shoot to record new scenes. The international mini-series Kaos, the new big franchise from the all-powerful US streaming company, has been in production for two years and has worked wonders with locations like Calle Parras in Malaga city centre, as the first official stills have revealed.

A few weeks ago all the entertainment chat was about the big bucks production set around World War II that was also filmed in Malaga province - We Were the Lucky Ones arrived on Disney+. Now it is the turn of Netflix to confirm the mega-launch of Kaos, a thriller with a mythological storyline and some dark humour that now has a date for its premiere: 29 August. The difference between the two series is that, while the first was reduced to just one week of location filming, the filming of the second was spread over months in Malaga, and they also had the main filming office set up here to coordinate the rest of the locations used in Spain.

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The first preview of just 20 seconds of Kaos, released a few months ago, already included some striking images of Malaga with action scenes in Lagunillas, bird's eye view shots of Parque del Sur and panoramic views of the provincial capital city from Los Montes. Now, with the new batch of official stills released, Netflix unveils the final result of the scene shot in the typically Malaga street called Parras, which was completely transformed to look like some rundown, backstreet part of New York. The outdoor sports court in this part of Malaga was repainted with graffiti and a phone box was installed from which British actor Nabhaan Rizwan (of 1917 and Station Eleven fame) is seen having a phone conversation, while some young people drink beer and play basketball in the background.

The actor plays the fun-loving Dionysus, Zeus' favourite son who is very up-front about his rebellious nature, but is never without his pet cat-in-a-bag in this sequence that was actually filmed over two years ago. In fact, it was filmed on 7 July 2021 when we were still in the midst of the post-pandemic hangover. Artists from the production team got busy painting murals of Poseidon on the walls of the sports court, walls that still showed the effect of the dust-cloud from Sahara that dyed all of Malaga an earthy orange that year. They set in place numerous extras of multinational appearance and dressed them according to their different 'tribes', be they basketball players or street skaters. All was done to provide more atmosphere and city life around the lead character played by Rizwan. After filming was complete, the graffiti disappeared the next day and the walls returned to their normal white, as they were before the muddy sand hit them.

The anecdote of the day was that a large number of the production crew for the Kaos mini-series came from Britain (the same production company behind HBO's Chernobyl) and were on their mobile phones for most of that working day. Why? Well, filming on that day coincided with rumours of the resignation of the then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and later, while the scene was being filmed, his resignation was officially confirmed.

Filming in Spain was led by the Malaga-based production company Fresco Film, servicing locations for this series not only along the Costa del Sol (Malaga, Marbella and Velez), but also filming scenes elsewhere in Andalucía (Cadiz and Seville), and Valencia and Madrid, to name but a couple of Spanish locations beyond the region of Andalucía. In fact, a mansion in Madrid, often used in film and TV productions, was the location of the celestial residence of the god of gods Zeus. Netflix had originally announced that the star taking up this role was Hugh Grant but, a few weeks later and with filming already started, he had to be replaced by another Hollywood star, Jeff Goldblum.

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Created by the scriptwriter of The End of the F***ing World, Charlie Covell, the series Kaos has at its centre a neurotic god of gods who one day discovers a wrinkle on his forehead, an everyday occurrence but one that comes with unforeseeable consequences. Thus, Zeus' security and self-esteem are under threat, which leads the king of Olympus into a spiral of paranoid thinking that influences those around him. They, in turn, are also pushed into a power struggle in which the goddess Hera, played by Janet McTeer (Ozark), and the party animal Poseidon, played by Cliff Curtis (Fear the Walking Dead), play their part.

This panorama of corruption and misrule creates a 'Eureka moment' for some mere mortals such as Riddy (Aurora Perrineau), Orpheus (Killian Scott), Ceneus (Misia Butler) and Ari (Leila Farzad), who begin to realise that they have been called to face up to Zeus, the god with wrinkles.