Some retirement homes have knitting clubs, and others have groups dedicated to solving grizzly crimes. The latter is what interests the protagonist of The Thursday Murder Club, a new Netflix movie based on Richard Osman’s bestselling 2020 British novel of the same name.
Directed by Chris Columbus, with a screenplay written by Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote, The Thursday Murder Club stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie as a group of retirement home residents who solve cold case murders for fun. But when a real murder happens at the swanky Cooper’s Chase retirement center, the group decides to put their skills to the test. The Thursday Murder Club supporting cast is equally star-studded, featuring David Tennant, Jonathan Pryce, Naomi Ackie, Daniel Mays, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Richard E. Grant, Tom Ellis, Geoff Bell, Paul Freeman, Sarah Niles, and Ingrid Oliver.
Much of the film takes place in the lavish, fictional retirement community known as Cooper’s Chase. Unfortunately for your wealthy grandparents, Cooper’s Chase is not a real place. Read on to find out more about The Thursday Murder Club filming locations.
The Thursday Murder Club movie was filmed on location and in a sound studio in England over the summer of 2024. The interior studio shots were filmed at Shepperton Studios, in Shepperton, Surrey, England, where Netflix opened a hub in 2019.
For the location shoots, the historic Englefield House estate in Englefield, Berkshire—west of London—doubled as the Cooper’s Chase retirement home. The castle-like estate has been standing since at least the 16th century, and has been a popular fillming location for many modern productions, including X-Men: First Class, Match Point, The King’s Speech, Cruella, the Descendants franchise and more.
In an interview with Decider, director Chris Columbus recalled reading The Thursday Murder Club book, which described “on the hill, overlooking Cooper’s Chase, it’s the church in the cemetery,” Columbus explained. “When I read that, I realized, ‘OK, I’m never going to find that. I’m going to have to digitally—add the cemetery to whatever location we found.’ Well, day two of location scouting, we found the Englefield House, which was basically the location in reverse. The Englefield House sits on a hill, and below it, is a church with a cemetery. It felt, somehow, spiritually meant to be.”
Another filming location was Stratton Road in Beaconsfield, according to a 2024 report by the Bucks Free Press. Beaconsfield is a small town in the county of Buckinghamshire, about 25 miles northwest of London. Most likely some of the driving scenes in the movie were filmed around there.
But the real star of the show was the Englefield House as Cooper’s Chase.
“I realized that I was creating, in a weird way, a version of Hogwarts,” Columbus, who directed the first two Harry Potter movies, told Decider. “Hogwarts was sort of this wish fulfillment place for 11-year-olds, and this becomes the antithesis of what we see, in America, as a retirement community. A lot of retirement homes are dreary, depressing places. I wanted to create this place that you would everyone would want to go to, when they reached a certain age. I wanted to create a place that if you were 40 years old, you’d want to go!”