How Ride or Die Staged Its Monaco Heist in a Historical Czech Grotto

Johannes Vermeer’s The Concert is considered the most valuable stolen painting still missing. In the fictional world of Ride or Die, Prime Video’s globetrotting buddy dramedy starring Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer, it’s been found.

The fifth episode of the series, filmed entirely in and around Prague, sends best friends Judith and Debbie to a party at the lavish Monte Carlo home of an arms dealer whose large collection of stolen treasures they plan to raid. (There’s a little matter of Debbie, played by Spencer, needing assets to pay back an eight-figure bribe her politician husband accepted.) While international assassin Judith (Waddingham) distracts their host, Debbie and accomplice Billy (Ed Skrein) venture into an underground gallery that production designer Marc Homes curated inside the 18th-century grotto of Ploskovice Chateau, located about an hour outside the Czech Republic capital.

“We gave it a James Bondish-ness,” Homes says of his team’s temporary modernizations that include a stunt-proof concrete passage in one corridor, a safe door, and museum-quality lighting and display features. “Ours is a construct of a magical comedy-action caper world. It’s a reality that’s just pushed five or 10 percent and made more cinematic. That’s a pleasure to do.”

For the treasure trove, he and Oscar-nominated set decorator Beatrice Brentnerová researched stolen works that were never recovered. You’ll spy The Concert as well as Rembrandt van Rijn’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, both lost in a 1990 heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “You print the image, then someone works over it so that you get the strokes in an oil painting,” Homes explains. “Otherwise, when the light hits it, it looks very flat like a print.” His team was equally hands-on with long-lost pieces of the medieval Lewis chessmen that they aged from a reproduction set, and Song dynasty pottery for which they hired a skilled ceramist to match the signature glazing and crackling.

Some liberties were taken. The “Breguet No. 160” made for Marie Antoinette was, in reality, a gold pocket watch rather than the porcelain pendule de cheminée that Debbie stashes in her handbag. Producers needed something a bit bigger and a lot more fragile that could eventually break as scripted. The particular Ducati motorcycle that Billy mounts wouldn’t be worth the quarter-million pounds that he estimates. However, Homes notes, “That little motorbike was extremely valuable. Originally, he was going to ride it off, but the owner just said, ‘No, I’m not having an actor on my bike.’ So that’s why he just sits on it.”

As for the ornate bath suite that Judith encounters upstairs while Debbie’s game is afoot, that was constructed on a soundstage alongside a bedroom and hallway as one en suite set. “I was looking at Parisian apartments, so you had a modern take on classical architecture,” Homes says. “All the proportions are very Louis XIV, French classical moldings, and then we just upscaled and modernized it as though it had a refurb.” Brentnerová is a “wallpaper fiend,” Homes adds, and supervising art director Martina Ter-Akopowá knows all the tricks of the trade, such as which Italian company makes ceramic sheets that can double as Verde Alpi marble.

This same episode also takes us inside another sophisticated bachelor pad, that of The Director (played by Bill Nighy), the head of the covert British organization for which Judith works. His modern art-filled home was staged in an apartment in Prague’s Lesser Town Square that’s frequently used for film shoots. Dark teal walls conceal an unexpected visitor, while an Art Deco bar has space to stash a weapon. The 18th-century Baroque tabernacle secretaire was originally intended for The Director’s office, but it was too large for that set. 

Homes modeled the office partly after Petschek Palace, a neo-Classicist building that had only been standing as a bank for roughly a decade when the Gestapo took it as their headquarters after occupying Prague in 1939. “That gave us the template,” Homes says. “I wanted the office to be long and thin so that you feel there’s a distance between him and the door, and there’s not much furniture. I wanted to do it in gloss black lacquer because it always looks great on film, so I had the marble floor checkered.”

It may look stark, but Homes and his team filled the space with beautiful props that told the history of assassins. “We found pieces of artwork that had illustrations from the Middle Ages of Arabic knights who were assassins, and then we painted those onto fabric and then put them on aged pieces of wood, so they looked like really ancient panels,” he offers as an example. They filled shelves with old books and found beautiful scientific instruments: “You know the guy is a collector,” Homes says. 

Nighy always waits to see a set until the last moment so it’s a surprise and inspiration. “It’s very moving when you walk in and see the amount of work and the detail that has gone into building it, and then you look at the props, which are absolutely meticulously assembled,” he says. “You’ll have diaries with every entry written. No one’s ever going to know that, but somebody has sat down and done it, and it gives you confidence, it gives you context, and it helps enormously.”