Warning: Before you watch A Simple Favor 2, aka Another Simple Favor—which is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video—you should know that you’ll feel compelled to book a lavish vacation to Capri after you see this movie. Can your wallet handle that right now? I know mine can’t!
Directed by Paul Feig, with a script written by Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis, Another Simple Favor is a sequel to the 2018 dark comedy thriller, A Simple Favor. Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick are back, as fellow moms and former best friends—until the sweet-tempered mommy vlogger Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick) uncovered the dark, murderous truth about the glamorous Emily Nelson (Lively). Now, Emily shows up back in Stephanie’s life and wants her to be her maid of honor, for an extravagant wedding in Capri.
If you can’t afford a trip to this gorgeous Italian coast, then watching Another Simple Favor is the next best thing. Read on to learn more about the Another Simple Favor filming locations in Capri and Rome, Italy.
Another Simple Favor was filmed on location in Capri, Italy. Director Paul Feig was inspired by the real-life Capri wedding of Vogue fashion editor Giovanna Battaglia, which took over the entire Italian island in 2016. Plus, Feig himself has been a regular Capri visitor for three decades.
“I know it like the back of my hand. I’ve been going there for 30 years, my wife and I every year. Hardly any movies have been shot there,” Feig told IndieWire in a recent interview. The director added that it was not an easy feat to pull off. “It’s just hard to get around. The logistics are horrendous there.”
But Feig was determined to make the location shoot happen. He recreated the Giovanna wedding for Emily’s wedding by filming the ceremony scene at Faro di Punta Carena, which is a working lighthouse perched high on the cliffs of Capri. The crew constructed the long deck over the cliffs, for Lively to walk down the aisle.
The scene where a suspicious Stephanie tails Emily through the streets of Capri, and eventually confronts an FBI agent, was filmed at Capri’s famous Piazzetta, the square in the center of town.
“That’s a place where everybody meets in Capri. It’s a crossroads between all the bars
and the boutiques, and it’s so descriptive of Capri,” explained location supervisor Elisabetta Tomasso in an interview for the movie’s production notes.
The movie also filmed some of the hotel scenes at Capri’s famed Grand Quisisana Hotel, a gorgeous historic hotel first in 1845.
That said, not everything was filmed in Capri. Some scenes were filmed in Rome, including the wedding reception. The reception was filmed at Villa Adriana in Rome, a UNESCO World Heritage site made up of ancient Roman ruins and classical buildings.
For the cast and crew, the location shoot was not only a fabulous chance to travel, but added to the film’s authenticity.
“The fact that we could shoot in Italy seemed like a miracle,” costume designer Renee Ehrlich Kalfus told Decider in an interview about the film’s costumes. “The influence of being on location in those places was awesome and very informative.”
Kalfus added that if A Simple Favor 3 does happen, she hopes Feig would get the chance for a location shoot again. “I sure hope he goes back to Italy or Europe somehow.”