Where Was ‘Tony’ Filmed? The Cape Cod Spots That Inspired the Legend

“We always knew we were going to shoot part of it on Cape Cod, so we were down there scouting every day. Before long, we realized we wanted to shoot every exterior [there] because it just looks much better.”

The cast and crew mainly shot in Provincetown (where the film is set) and in Dennis, a town about an hour south on the Cape. There were a few exceptions, although all still within Massachusetts —the scenes depicting Tony’s bumbling academic efforts at Vassar were actually filmed at Wheaton College in Norton; the Bourdain family home was a house in Brockton, and love interest Nancy’s vacation house was shot in Plymouth. Below, Charlie gives us the lowdown on the filming process behind Tony—the hardest locations to find, the best memories from shooting the film, and the joys of making friends on the job.

Where was Tony filmed?

Provincetown, Cape Cod

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Commercial Street, Provincetown

“Provincetown has always been a home for artists, poets, writers, and painters. I’ve found, when I travel around the world doing this, that the ends of peninsulas are like that—the artistic people tend to drift out to the end of the peninsula. It’s the last place to go, and so they all end up there. Provincetown has been that way since at least the ’20s. It’s always been a real kind of hippie-dippy town, before there were even hippies.

I knew what P-Town looked like back then. It wouldn’t have been the same result if some guy came from Los Angeles and scouted this movie. For every single shot, I thought about what it used to be like, and then I would talk to the production designer about what I thought should change from my memories of the place at that particular time.

Originally, we were going to shoot the P-Town scenes earlier in the year, but because of cast availability, we pushed the shoot and ended up there the third week of June, which is a really busy time. If you look down the street, the buildings are the same as they were back then, but all the signs are different—there’s pot dispensaries and all sorts of things that are non-period, so the art department dressed the whole street. But closing down a busy resort town in season and with very little money was really challenging.”