The CW's 'The Originals' shoots on-location in the city where it's set, New Orleans (2024)

Encounters on our streets with film- and TV-production crews have become old-hat to locals, but visitors to New Orleans still get a little thrill when they accidentally come across a setting where Hollywood's lights, cameras and "Action!" are making a scene. It happened in several locations in or near the French Quarter earlier this month, as the sexy-vampire CW drama "The Originals" came to town to shoot scenes for three upcoming episodes, the first of which, subtitled "The River in Reverse," airs at 8 p.m. Tuesday (Nov. 26) on WNOL.

As a crew prepared to shoot a scene at Royal and Dumaine, a woman walked up and asked which movie was shooting here. Told it was "The Originals," she immediately turned to her husband and said, "We're not leaving."

Earlier, a group of men from Denmark discovered another scene under way on the Moon Walk. Told the show’s title, one asked, “Wampires?”

Ja.

The series, a spinoff of “The Vampire Diaries” set in New Orleans but mostly shot in suburban Atlanta (where one street of Conyers, Ga., has been dressed to stand in for the French Quarter), is the CW’s best-performing new series. A few days after its one-day New Orleans production visit, the youth-targeting network picked up the series for a full season.

For Charles Michael Davis, who plays King-of-the-Quarter Marcel on the show, “The Originals” has become a life-changing engagement.

“It goes from ‘I think you look familiar’ to ‘You’re that guy on TV,’ and people ask you what show you’re on, to ‘I really like the show, congratulations, great job,’” he said during a break between takes in the Quarter. “I was at a wedding in Wisconsin and we were walking back to the hotel. It was like 11 o’clock at night, and two girls were like, ‘Oh, I think it’s him!’ And they tweeted it immediately. I looked at Twitter, and they were like, ‘I’m 99 percent sure I saw Charles Michael Davis on the street, and he smiled!’”

The cast-and-crew's recent visit to New Orleans wasn't the show's first. The series' pilot episode, which aired near the end of the most recent season of "The Vampire Diaries," was largely shot here. The actors, Davis, said, have been able to call on that experience when re-creating New Orleans and its fantasy characters in Georgia.

“After being in New Orleans, you’re pretty aware of the differences,” he said. “The details of the architecture, and also the closeness of the streets and how compact everything is.

“I told my girlfriend, ‘Yeah, I could see how someone would go missing and actually fall into the Mississippi. I believe those lines that come up in the show.’

“When we came here, we treated New Orleans like it was a beautiful canvas, a beautiful painting, a beautiful picture, and we wanted to show it in a certain way. All of the colors and the saturation and also the different colors of light that are part of the city.”

Capturing those colors and that light is partly the job of Matt Hastings, a co-executive producer for "The Originals," who oversaw the New Orleans-shot scenes.

"One of the drives for our show, certainly from Julie (Plec), the creator of our show, is to get that crackle of New Orleans you really can't get anywhere else," he said, as Davis shot a riverfront scene with co-star Claire Holt. "That sense of place, we replicate it as best we can on stages, and we have a really nice 'back lot' in Conyers, which serves as one street of New Orleans. But there's no other place like New Orleans, and it affects us on many levels, both in the cinematic impact it has, but also when we're all here, it's like we load up on New Orleans and what it feels like. We bring that back to Atlanta and try to replicate that as best we can. That's everything from set design to music, all of it. The heartbeat of our show is certainly here.

“It’s that sexiness. It’s that sense that anything can happen at any time. That’s good for story, and also there’s a culture here that works well, that shakes hands well, with the creative (talent) on our show. There’s no place like it.”

Got a TV question? Contact Dave Walker at dwalker@nola.com or 504.826.3429. Read more TV coverage at NOLA.com/tv. He's @DaveWalkerTV on Twitter, and Dave Walker TV on Facebook.