1966 Mississippi was built across Georgia: Here's where By Any Means was filmed
By Any Means
"While Atlanta is not 1960s Mississippi, you can find pockets where the old architecture remains." Location manager Kyle Hinshaw – whose credits include Bad Boys for Life and Baby Driver – summed up the central challenge of filming By Any Means in a single sentence. The film is set in Mississippi in 1966. It was filmed entirely in Georgia.
Directed by Elegance Bratton, written by Sascha Penn, and starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as young Black FBI agent Wayne Strider and Mark Wahlberg as notorious mafia hitman Greg Scarpa, the film is inspired by true events: the FBI's 1964 recruitment of the real Scarpa to locate three missing civil rights workers in Mississippi using methods that blurred the line between law enforcement and organised crime. Nicole Beharie, Josh Lucas, David Strathairn and Giancarlo Esposito round out the cast. Terence Blanchard composed the score.
Principal photography ran from April 7 to May 15, 2025, under the code name EEE, based out of Pangaea Studios but spreading across multiple Georgia towns to capture an authentic 1960s Southern backdrop.
Filming in Covington took place on Washington Street SW, across number 1145 – the Town House Café, a building previously used for filming The Vampire Diaries. Mark Wahlberg was spotted filming on location in Covington during the shoot. The city's well-preserved historic downtown, with its antebellum courthouse square and period commercial architecture, gave the production a convincing approximation of a 1960s Mississippi town centre.
Conyers and its surrounding areas were also used to replicate 1960s Southern settings – its older residential neighbourhoods and rural outskirts providing the domestic and agricultural environments the story required beyond the town-centre sequences. The towns of Griffin and Sharpsburg in Georgia's Coweta County also hosted production, with various key portions of the film recorded in and around both communities. We have no specific details about the filming locations.
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Henry County contributed specific outdoor location work – including a pecan farm, providing the rural Southern agricultural environment that distinguishes the Mississippi Delta landscape from Georgia's urban edges.
Locations in Locust Grove and Stockbridge rounded out the production's South Metro Atlanta footprint – the two communities contributing additional period-appropriate environments to the wider Georgia location map.
Co-producer Alex M. Lebovici was direct about what it took to finish: "There were so many obstacles, so many highs and lows, it's difficult to fully put into words. At times, this film felt impossible. But persistence paid off, and it has become the work I'm most proud of."
By Any Means opened in US cinemas on September 4, 2026, distributed by Paramount Pictures.
SOURCE
IMDb // Paramount Pictures // Wikipedia
CREDITS
© Paramount Pictures // Photos Eli Ade
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