Picture Credit: Instagram / Netflix
Curt Beech makes politics look good. Not only are the main characters wonderfully competent and dapper in The Diplomat, but the spaces and places they enter and exit provide posh or stark battlegrounds for political crossfire. Beech, who’s been the production designer since season three of the Debora Cahn-created series, got to build and recreate some striking locations for season four.
There’s the G4 summit in Italy, a hospital room on a warship, and Windsor Castle, to name a few of the locations in the dynamite series. “This is a really level-headed and smart, smart, smart group of people who’ve done this,” Beech told What’s on Netflix. “I haven’t done this kind of show, but everyone else above me has. And back to The West Wing and lots of other shows that they’ve worked on, they know what they’re doing. They’re old hands at this, and this is just the next great version of what they do. It’s a pleasure.”
Recently, the production designer took us behind the scenes of the successful fourth season of The Diplomat.
The Diplomat. Keri Russell as Kate Wyler in episode 401 of The Diplomat. Cr. Nick Wall/Netflix © 2026
I’d like to start with the 16th-century villa you found for the finale. How did you land on that location?
How did we not? We had an incredible location manager in Italy, Elisabetta Tomasso, and she found that place for us and everything that we found in Italy. It was an exhaustive search. We started with all of Italy and then we honed it down to Tuscany and then we started looking in Florence and outside of Florence.
Almost all of it took us outside of Florence, because logistically, shooting Florence in the middle of spring and summer is really, really tough. It’s a very, very busy place. We didn’t want to deprive the tourists of their joy in Florence by putting a bunch of movie trucks in town. So, we moved up to Lucca and Lucca and environs and found a lot of them there. And the G7 location is spectacular. It’s really spectacular.
Did you look at many past G7 summits and take any influence?
I looked at all the G7 summits. They’re very much a reflection of the time when they happen, which is interesting because what they usually do is they take over a small town, which we did also in Lucca, and they will build a pavilion or something onto an existing location and then they’ll make a very custom room. 10 times out of 10, it’s very modern. It feels very much like the future. There’s all these conferences, you’re looking toward the future.
In this one, because of the state of mind of our president and because of the room also, we decided to do something much more traditional, which is not usually what the G7 does. There is tech in the room, which is necessary. There’s a big camera that sits in the middle that records everyone and is a feed for monitors that are in the room.
That always happens and there’s the microphones on the desk which are necessary, but we had custom desks built for the space that really unified it with the space that we found and did not go into a modern vibe. We kept it old world and antique and Italian antique, and it really gave it a different feel.
When researching these spaces, I imagine sometimes you look at real-world references and think, “This isn’t the most cinematic.” What’s the balance for you when designing a space based on a real place? How much embellishment is okay?
It’s absolutely necessary. I mean, if you’re making a documentary or a reenactment, then you have a responsibility to make what was there. But when you’re doing entertainment, it’s a very different matter and you are beholden to the constraints of the camera and the interests of the camera, and you have to address those interests and depart from what is real.
In our case, we heighten what is real. I mean, the rooms that we go into are stunners of their own right, and the things that we built on stage have to keep up with that. So, it is almost always something new and different and designed for the camera and not to necessarily reflect reality. We think we can do better than reality.
Reality must be helpful with Windsor Castle. Such a spectacular-looking place. What were some of the little details about that castle that you really wanted to get right?
I can tell you Windsor Castle was nine locations for us. Nine different locations. So the exterior was at Burghley House, 16th century. The safe room was at a church on the Upper West Side of New York. The Equerries Room where most of the staff hung out was at a mansion on Long Island that was built 1916.
The hallways were at Lancaster House, which is 19th century. There’s a pull aside that took place in the actual Foreign Office of the United Kingdom. The library was at a monastery in New York, and Grace’s study where she retreats is at Sleepy Hollow Country Club in upstate New York.
The Diplomat. Episode 401 of The Diplomat. Cr. Nick Wall/Netflix © 2026
All came together so well.
There’s such a big mix of things and styles and putting those together, these houses and these palaces are built over time. You get a little bit of leeway with different styles because they’re added onto over the years.
Windsor Castle has got several different styles represented within it. There’s always a blue room and a red room and a green room and a gold room and a pink room. If you can embrace those different flavors of rooms, you’re going to be absolutely fine.
I imagine there are so many experts who have dedicated years of their lives to knowing Windsor Castle inside and out. Did you have any consultants?
I imagine some of them will be absolutely mortified, but we can’t shoot in Windsor Castle. It’s not an option. So, we have to do our best and we have to bring together a group of rooms that are… We are also constrained by a schedule. We can’t pick where we want to do these things. If we wanted to do them all in England, it would’ve really destroyed the shooting schedule and the edit and just all the different things that happened to get an episode from A to B.
We have to be flexible, and we do have consultants who help us with getting the vehicle lineups correct, like the motorcades. We have certain things that happen, what the guards do in the courtyard at our Windsor Castle, that was very specific. And also we had a protocol person who helped us with the panic room, and there were a lot of things he could not tell us about the real panic room because I’m certain there is one.
No details were given, but when we told him what we were thinking about and what our ideas were for the panic room, he was like, “That sounds okay. There might be some of this and there might be some of this.” And I was like, “Well, what if we wanted to create a room that was constructed in this way and designed in this way?” We would run that by him.
We talked about how much time might actually be spent in the panic room, and we based our decor and design on that information. So, we love a consultant. It’s very, very helpful to help get details right and get some of the small things right that make it feel more real.
The Diplomat. (L to R) Jodie Whittaker as Bethan Vaughn, Keri Russell as Kate Wyler in episode 405 of The Diplomat. Cr. Nick Wall/Netflix © 2026
How was it working on a warship?
Actually, the warship was pretty easy.
It was shot on a warship, right? Did I misread that detail?
No. It was shot on a training vessel.
Okay.
It is a training ship for sailors, and it’s at a college in New York, in the city, and it has two bridges. It has a top bridge where they will drive the ship, and then there is a second one below that matches it. It can be used as training, and they can see everything that’s going on upstairs.
It was great to find this location, and they were great partners with us to do all of the interiors of the warship, and it all looked very real because it all was very real. And then the exterior of it was primarily done in a parking lot.
The Diplomat. (L to R) Bradley Whitford as Todd Penn, Marlon Perrier as Navy Anesthesiologist, Allison Janney as Grace Penn in episode 402 of The Diplomat. Cr. Clifton Prescod/Netflix © 2026
Do you ever make a call, asking, “Hey, we can use a real warship for this scene?”
I cannot comment on if any explorations were done to find a warship.
[Laughs] That is a perfect no comment for The Diplomat, I think. What do you find really fulfilling about recreating so many places and spaces for the series?
I think what’s most satisfying is supporting the story and making sure that what we’re doing is good for the script. When it comes together and when it looks right, and when the actors walk on and say, “Oh, I feel this feels normal, this feels like where we would be,” that’s very satisfying.
This show is very strange in that we almost never are in spaces that belong to the main characters. Every other show, there is someone’s apartment or their house or their family’s house. Every place these people go, they are visitors. Eidra probably moves every few months. That’s the story we’re telling with her place. Hal and Kate, when they go to Winfield, they have a room that they stay in, but it is not their room. The only person in this season, I think, who has a space that belongs to them is Bethan Vaughn, the new prime minister.
And last season, it was a real treat to dig into Grace Penn’s Amagansett compound, which was something that the show hadn’t really traded in very much, was going to people’s houses. So it’s unusual in that way. It is bringing people together physically, but rarely emotionally to special places that the public doesn’t see.
In season three, how did you want to make that beach house an extension of Grace Penn and who she is, what she likes, and what she doesn’t like?
Well, that was a real opportunity to show someone in a really controlled environment. It is both comfortable and somewhat presentational because she receives people there. So, we did a lot of research about Kennedys, the presidential families, other homes and things like that.
The Kennedy compound was a big inspiration for that, and just capturing a vibe that is comfortable, has to be comfortable because this is sort of the opposite of what we’re used to. This is a comfortable space where things are uncomfortable, whereas most of the rest of the time there are uncomfortable spaces where people are trying to find comfort. So that was fun to sort of flip it a little bit.
When you watch the show—
I don’t watch the show. No, I’m kidding.
I’d be like, “Ah, very method. Production designers can’t watch it.” But when you watch it and see chaos happening in these beautiful spaces, what enjoyment do you get out of the writing and how it uses these locations?
When I watch, the writing is so good and so taut and so planful that it brings me incredible pleasure. When I was watching seven and eight recently, I skipped the middle episodes and I went straight to the end because I was curious to see how Italy had come out. So I watched seven and eight just a couple nights ago, and the scene under the tree, the four-hander with all four of our principals just crackles.
And the editing and the direction and the slightest glances from one to the other and the eyeline that goes boom, boom, boom, boom around the room and across the table and then across the table again, it is masterful. And when you get a scene like that that just jumps out, it’s really wonderful to watch. That could have happened in the living room, that could have happened in a number of other places, but having it outside in Tuscany is a gift also, and the lighting is absolutely gorgeous.
The Diplomat. Episode 408 of The Diplomat. Cr. Erika Kuenka/Netflix © 2026
.It’s great storytelling. Curt, my last question goes back a bit. Was your first job on Criminal, the John C. Reilly movie?
Criminal? Yeah, it was.
That was your first gig. I’m a fan of that movie, but what was the first gig like?
Nobody saw that movie.
It was on HBO when I was a kid all the time.
Oh, really?
Yeah, it’s a good movie.
It is a good movie. I think it’s underappreciated.
Great role for John C. Reilly.
Oh, it’s nice. As a first job, it was really fascinating. I was a PA. I was in the art department with what felt like two or three other people. It was a tiny, tiny movie with some big talent in it. My eyes were just wide open to everything going on around me.
I got to know LA really well on that show because I had been in school for several years and sort of head down on my desk really working hard, and then to get out and see how it’s actually done was really eye-opening. AMy boss, Phil Messina, is an incredible designer, and being able to sit with him and do projects for him while we were there was great fun. It was really helpful and a good first job. And then my first studio, big studio gig after that was Collateral.
