Stand in for Hawaii to a Dunellen courthouse, Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff have spent the summer crisscrossing New Jersey for Trust the Man, a 1968 Vietnam-era spy thriller written and directed by Will Graham, the mind behind Daisy Jones and the Six. Here’s everywhere the cameras have actually been rolling.
Hollywood Keeps Choosing New Jersey This Summer, and the Receipts Are Piling Up
From a Jersey Shore motel standing in for Hawaii to a Dunellen courthouse doubling as a corporate legal drama set, the state’s film footprint has never looked busier. Here’s everywhere the cameras have actually been rolling.
Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff have spent the summer crisscrossing New Jersey for Trust the Man, a 1968 Vietnam-era spy thriller written and directed by Will Graham, the mind behind Daisy Jones and the Six. Radcliffe plays an ambitious Army Intelligence officer assigned to investigate a highly decorated soldier played by Groff, a man harboring a past that clearly isn’t what it looks like on paper. Lucas Hedges and Kate Mara round out the cast. Because the story demands such varied backdrops, suburban streets, retro architecture, and coastline convincing enough to pass for Hawaii, the production ended up mapping a genuinely wide footprint across the state rather than settling for a single soundstage and a green screen.
Seaside Park
Wrapped Friday, July 31The vintage, orange-doored Charlroy Motel on Ocean Avenue got a full period transformation, with retro props and vintage cars filling out late-night scenes near the boardwalk. Radcliffe also shot sequences directly on the oceanfront beach, doubling for Hawaii’s coastline.
Seaside Heights
Boardwalk SequencesJust next door to the motel shoot, the crew filmed active scenes at The Sawmill on the boardwalk. Radcliffe took time between takes to greet the hundreds of local fans who lined up early Friday morning for a handshake and a photo.
Montclair
Where It All Started, July 9The production’s New Jersey shoot kicked off here, deep in residential neighborhoods around Gates Avenue, where locals spotted Radcliffe and Groff filming street sequences well before the Shore leg of the production began.
Bayonne
A Week of Urban SequencesProduction logs and local sightings point to a full week of indoor and localized urban filming here, the quiet middle chapter of the shoot sandwiched between Montclair’s suburban streets and the Shore’s coastal doubling work.
Trust the Man isn’t traveling alone this summer. New Jersey’s film industry is having a genuinely record season, and several other major productions are actively rolling cameras across the state at the same time.
Possession
A high-profile remake of the 1981 supernatural cult classic, with Margaret Qualley and Paul Dano joined by newly announced cast members Madeline Brewer, Emory Cohen, and Nicholas Alexander Chavez.
Cupertino
A corporate courtroom drama from the creators of The Good Wife, starring Mike Colter and Rachel Keller, currently filming major scenes in Dunellen.
72 Hours
A high-octane action thriller from producer Will Packer, starring Kevin Hart and Teyana Taylor, leaning on North Jersey’s industrial landscapes for its set pieces.
The Boss’s biographical feature spent significant time filming on location across Asbury Park, Freehold, and fourteen other New Jersey municipalities earlier this year, tracing the singer’s roots directly back to where they actually happened.
Directed by Courteney Cox and starring Patricia Arquette and David Harbour, this true-crime feature took over the Surrender Café on Amboy Avenue in Woodbridge, a local Sayreville business, and several area public parks before wrapping production.
An Adam Sandler-produced Netflix teen musical comedy starring Steve Buscemi and Melanie Lynskey, which transformed a Ridgewood high school and a Livingston pizzeria into working production sets ahead of a March 2026 release.
Here’s my honest read on why this particular summer feels different from the usual scattered production news. It’s not just that a few notable names are filming somewhere in the state. It’s the sheer range of what’s being shot here at once, a Vietnam-era spy thriller doubling the Shore as Hawaii, a horror remake with a stacked ensemble cast, a network legal drama, a Netflix action blockbuster, and multiple true stories rooted directly in actual New Jersey towns, all rolling simultaneously. That’s not luck. That’s an industry infrastructure, tax incentives, crew availability, genuinely varied locations, finally operating at a scale where productions this different from each other can all choose New Jersey in the same season instead of picking it up as an afterthought.
