START DATE: GRACEPOINT with David Tennant & Anna Gunn to Start Filming in Victoria on January 28th – Updated

UPDATE: Start of filming pushed back to January 28th according to latest BC Production list.

American network FOX has another event series slated to film near Vancouver, with an expected start date of January 28th. The 10-episode remake Gracepoint stars British actor David Tennant of timey-wimey Doctor Who fame, reprising his role as the lead detective investigating  a boy’s murder in a small seaside town, a murder that becomes a national media feeding frenzy. This time the murder happens in the California coastal town of Gracepoint to be played by Oak Bay Village and other locations in greater Victoria, not the British Broadchurch played by West Bay in Dorset in the original series. And Anna Gunn of Breaking Bad will take on the role of  the local detective, a wife and mother who lives in Gracepoint and has strong ties to the bereaved family and almost all of the suspects.

Michael Pena of American Hustle will play the murdered boy’s father, with Virginia Kull as his mother. Jackie Weaver co-stars as the glowering stranger in town who knows more than she’s letting on and Kevin Zegers of Canadian feature films All the Wrong Reasons and The Colony as the young newspaper reporter. UPDATE: Jessica Lucas is cast as the big-city San Francisco Globe reporter and Nick Nolte as the owner of the local kayak rental who runs a wildlife observation program where the murdered boy volunteered. Madalyn Horcher is the murdered boy’s sister and Kendrick Sampson, her boyfriend. Sarah-Jane Potts (sister of Andrew-Lee Potts) is the flirty owner of the hotel.

If it’s not too late to ask the writers, all I hope from the adaption is that Tennant’s American detective Emmett Carver not be such a sad sack as his British detective inspector Alec Hardy, wasting this funny man’s bigger-on-the-inside comedic talents. Otherwise I’ll gladly watch the exact same mystery unfold with a new cast even if the killer doesn’t change. UPDATE: FOX says Gracepoint will have a “different ending” than the original.

Island View Beach below has the right kind of bluffs from which the young boy might have fallen to where his body is found [and a sandy beach]. Of course production could use a different beach since Gracepoint will be made up of Oak Bay Village and multiple other locations like Once Upon a Time’s Storybrooke (Steveston, New Westminster and Fort Langley), Bates Motel’s White Pine Bay (Horseshoe Bay, Steveston and motel set in Aldergrove) and Cedar Cove (Deep Cove and Fort Langley) are on the mainland. Or as the greater Victoria film commission put it: a character could be walking down Oak Bay Avenue, turn a corner and end up on the Sidney pier.

There is no word yet on whether Gracepoint will build a massive semi-permanent set like fellow Fox event series Wayward Pines did on Pioneer Avenue in Agassiz. We will see how things unfold in the new year and await more casting news.

Link to CHEK News video

Link to Victoria Times Colonist article.