Syfy and USA Network · four seasons · created by Chris Sheridan
Where was Resident Alien filmed?
Somewhere in the first season of Resident Alien, a building on the main street of Patience, Colorado, has the word LADYSMITH across its front in big raised letters. While the episode was being edited, the post-production supervisor asked Chris Sheridan, who created the show and ran it, whether the sign ought to be blurred: anyone who read it would know the town was Ladysmith, British Columbia. Sheridan kept it. A Colorado town could have a Ladysmith Trading Company, he reasoned, and leaving the name in the shot was his thank-you to the town that had lent the show its main street.
12
places on the route
Ladysmith first, then Greater Vancouver, the mountains and Howe Sound — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Where is Resident Alien filmed? In British Columbia, Canada, for all four seasons and for the pilot before them. Patience's Main Street is First Avenue in Ladysmith, an old coal town on Vancouver Island, a two-hour ferry ride from the show's base in Vancouver. Ken Brooker, the location manager, reckoned in 2021 that 90 per cent of the filming took place in Vancouver, where the show had its two soundstages. Harry's cabin is a facade on the shore of Howe Sound near Britannia Beach, and the glaciers, which the crew could reach only by helicopter, are in the mountains near Whistler.
Where is Resident Alien filmed in Colorado?
On screen only. Patience is a Colorado town in the story, and Sheridan put it there himself: in the Dark Horse comic the show is based on, Patience is in Washington State. He wanted the Rockies closing in around the town and the people a little isolated inside them. What Colorado gave the show was its look. Michael Joy, the production designer, built the bar set after a biker bar he knew in Durango, and the colourful buildings in the middle of Ladysmith reminded Sheridan of Crested Butte.
What town is Resident Alien filmed in?
Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island, 60 km from downtown Vancouver in a straight line and a ferry crossing away in practice. The pilot was shot in Vancouver in 2018, on a lot that was sold afterwards, and that sent the production looking for a town. Brooker's brief was a small mountain town, remote enough but with some life in it, where the town hall, the clinic and the bar could all stand within sight of one another. Ladysmith gave him that.
Joy described each trip as something like summer camp run as a military operation: pack up everything, cross on the ferry, dress the town, shoot for three days. The crew first came at the end of January 2020, was stopped by the pandemic before a planned return in March, and got back in October. It kept coming back in later seasons, the last time from 17 to 19 March 2025.
First Avenue, Ladysmith
The Ladysmith Trading Company building at 410 First Avenue on 30 September 2018, with the town's name in raised letters above the shopfronts.
1st Avenue between Gatacre Street and Roberts Street, with the side streets around it, downtown Ladysmith. A public street; the shops and cafés are open.
Patience's Main Street in all four seasons, and mostly the middle of it, where three brightly painted buildings stand. Joy's crew would dress three blocks of First Avenue and shoot bits of several different episodes in one visit. Banners reading Patience, Colorado went up along the street beside American flags, and a wooden sign outside the RBC branch welcomed visitors to Patience.
The blocks underneath date from the early 1900s. James Dunsmuir laid the town out as a home for the families of the men in his coal mines, and in 1900 he named it after Ladysmith in South Africa, whose siege the British had just lifted. He named the streets after British generals of the same war, so the corner at the centre of Patience, First Avenue and Roberts Street, carries the name of Field Marshal Lord Roberts.
Some of the real town stayed in the frame on purpose: the name Sheridan refused to blur is on the Ladysmith Trading Company building at 410 First Avenue. Local shops have turned up on screen too: Nancy's Fashions, Little Otter's Den, White Space Living. In January 2020 the crew filmed at night inside and outside For Pet's Sake at 416 First Avenue, and in front of the Ladysmith & District Credit Union at 330. Joy has said that the clinic, the town hall and the outside of Asta and D'Arcy's apartment, a former schoolhouse, are all Ladysmith buildings; which ones, the production has never said.
The street had played an American small town before. In September 2018 Sonic the Hedgehog turned First Avenue into Green Hills, Montana, with a picture-framing shop as the sheriff's office. By the fourth season people were crossing over for the show: in March 2025 NanaimoNewsNOW reported a couple from southern California who had taken the ferry from Vancouver to see where the show was being filmed.
341 1st Avenue, Ladysmith, a few steps from the corner of Roberts Street. A fish-and-chip shop.
In January 2020 the fish-and-chip shop's front was one of the exteriors the crew got ready on its first visit. When the show came back for its third season in March 2023, CHEK News reported, Barnacle Barney's became the '59ers Bar. The bar in Patience is The 59, named in the show for 59 miners who died in a mine accident long ago.
Its interior is a set. For the pilot, Joy said, the budget would not quite stretch to a bar set, so the crew scraped the cost together from the other sets, and he calls it his favourite set in the show. Ladysmith had a real mine disaster: in 1909 a coal-mine explosion killed 32 men.
Where is Resident Alien filmed on the mainland?
Every trip to Ladysmith meant putting the production on a ferry, and as the seasons went on Patience also turned up in towns closer to the studios. Hollywood North Buzz, a Vancouver blog about local film shoots, reported Ladner, in Delta, dressed as Patience in December 2024 for the fourth season's opening episode, which Alan Tudyk directed.
Fort Langley
Glover Road in Fort Langley on 3 August 2013: low shopfronts under the trees and cars parked along the street.
A village on the Fraser River in the Township of Langley, about 40 km east of downtown Vancouver. Public streets.
Part of the third season was filmed in Fort Langley. According to Hollywood North Buzz, Max walks through the village as Patience with Harry beside him in his alien form, and Fort Langley became a handier Main Street than Ladysmith because it is on the mainland. The village grew up around a Hudson's Bay Company fur-trading post, which is now a national historic site.
Central Park, Burnaby
A pond in Burnaby's Central Park on 11 September 2016, with tall conifers reflected in the water.
Central Park, Burnaby, on the Vancouver boundary next to Metrotown. A public park.
Family Day, the fifth episode of the second season, was filmed here as Patience, according to Hollywood North Buzz, which posted a picture in October 2021 of a big set full of children with painted faces. The park dates from 1891 and was once a Royal Navy reserve, kept for masts and spars; much of its 90 hectares is still temperate rainforest crossed by trails.
Where is Resident Alien filmed in Vancouver?
Mostly indoors. In 2024 Joy described the show's two studios: one with the diner, the mayor's office, the police station and Asta and D'Arcy's apartment, the other with the bar, the Hawthornes' house and Harry's cabin. Hollywood North Buzz puts the stages in Delta, south of the city. Out on the streets, according to the same blog, downtown Vancouver played New York in two episodes of the second season, An Alien in New York and Escape From New York.
Vancouver Art Gallery
The Vancouver Art Gallery lit up on the night of 20 February 2012: the columned portico and wide steps of the old courthouse.
Downtown Vancouver, beside Robson Square. A public art museum; the plaza in front is open.
Harry's scene at the New York Public Library in those episodes was filmed here, according to Hollywood North Buzz. The building was the provincial courthouse, designed by Francis Rattenbury, and the gallery moved into it in 1983.
Howe Street and West Hastings Street
West Hastings Street between Hornby and Howe on 12 September 2016, the block next to the Howe Street corner.
The corner of Howe Street and West Hastings Street, downtown Vancouver, about 500 m north-east of the Art Gallery. Public streets.
On 29 September 2021, Hollywood North Buzz reported, the crew filled this intersection with extras for New York street scenes. Onlookers' photographs show Tudyk as Harry with his mouth full of pizza, Sara Tomko's Asta beside him.
Boundary Bay Airport and North 40 Park Reserve
The main hangar at Boundary Bay Airport, seen across the grass in August 2005.
Delta, south of Vancouver: the airport, and the North 40 park reserve just over a kilometre north of it. A working airport; the park is public.
According to Hollywood North Buzz, the crew filmed at the airport and in North 40 in February 2022. The airfield was built in 1941 to train pilots for the Second World War and reopened for light aircraft in 1983. North 40, next door, is open grassland with the mountains on the horizon.
Where is Resident Alien filmed in the mountains?
Up the Sea-to-Sky corridor north of Vancouver, whenever Patience needed ice and snow. Hollywood North Buzz reported a two-day shoot at Whistler in February 2022 for D'Arcy's ski qualifier in the thirteenth episode of the second season, with a call out for skilled skiers as extras. The glaciers were higher up.
Rainbow Mountain and the Pemberton Icefield
Rainbow Mountain seen from the Whistler ski slopes on 12 January 2019, above cloud filling the valley.
Rainbow Mountain, about 9 km north-west of Whistler, and the Pemberton Icefield, some 30 km beyond it. The crew went in by helicopter.
Brooker named these two as the glaciers used for the first season's scenes on the ice. Both were helicopter-only, and getting people and gear up and down again was, he said, a real challenge. The show went back to the ice for the third season. Tudyk posted a photo of the crew filming "up on the glacier" and proposed a fourth season in which Harry suddenly prefers beaches.
Rainbow Mountain, a broad glaciated wall above the Callaghan Valley, is in plain view from the Whistler ski slopes, and people hike, snowshoe and ski-tour on it. The Pemberton Icefield covers about 300 square kilometres; heli-skiing and heli-hiking outfits fly people onto it.
Harry's cabin
Harry lives in a cabin on a mountain lake. The lake is the sea. Joy and the location team hunted for a real cabin, but the pilot hinged on a fight with an alien eight feet tall, and the team soon realised it would have to build. They found a shore outside Vancouver on Howe Sound, an inlet of the ocean that can pass for a lake on camera, and put up the outside of the cabin there; the inside was a set on a soundstage. Joy took its look, wood with red trim, from his grandfather's house.
Britannia Mine Museum
The old mill stepping up the hillside at the Britannia Mine Museum on 5 May 2013, with a giant haul truck parked at the right.
Britannia Beach, on the Sea to Sky Highway, about 38 km north of downtown Vancouver in a straight line. A museum, open to visitors.
The fourth season came here in 2025. The crew got the museum grounds ready on 24 and 25 February, filmed on them from the 26th to the 28th, and came back on the morning of 31 March. The museum lists Resident Alien among the productions filmed at Britannia.
In the 1920s and 1930s Britannia was the largest copper mine in the British Empire, and it closed in 1974. Until 1956 the company town could be reached only by steamship.
A cove on Howe Sound just south of Britannia Beach, about 1.5 km from the mine museum. Private land.
SYFY WIRE put the cabin facade at Britannia Beach. The production's notice for its last day here, in March 2025, sends the crew to "the established set" at Minaty Bay, the cove next door, and keeps all the filming on private property. Hollywood North Buzz named Minaty Bay as Harry's cabin throughout the show's run, and according to the same blog Asta and D'Arcy also had scenes on this shore in the second season.
The last day
Production ended on Monday, 31 March 2025. The notice to the neighbours had the crew at Britannia Mines for the morning and at the set in Minaty Bay after that, and Hollywood North Buzz reported that the series finale's scene at Harry's cabin was shot on that last day, with nearly the whole cast and crew there.
Of the two places the crew worked that day, the museum is the one that takes visitors. The tall building on its hillside is Mill No. 3, where the ore once worked its way down through the plant by gravity, a National Historic Site since 1987. Visitors ride an underground train through a haulage tunnel driven in 1914.
