Leon – The Professional filming locations
Film locations: New York; New Jersey; France
Leon – The Professional filming location: the interior of Mathilda’s hotel: Hotel Chelsea, 222 West 23rd Street, New York
Luc Besson’s stylish thriller is set in New York, though most interiors were filmed in the studio in Paris, as hitman Léon (Jean Reno) versus rampantly OTT crooked cop Stansfield (Gary Oldman).
Real New York locations include Spanish Harlem, Chinatown and Wall Street; along with Hoboken and West New York, New Jersey.
Leon – The Professional filming location: Now gone – Danny Aiello’s restaurant: Guido’s, Ninth Avenue, New York
‘Tony’s’, Danny Aiello’s restaurant, supposedly in ‘Little Italy’, was Guido’s, which stood at 511 9th Avenue at West 38th Street, south of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It was a wonderfully down-to-earth Italian restaurant in a room behind the Supreme Macaroni Co store but, as you can see, it's no more.
Leon – The Professional filming location: Guido's - no more.
Photograph: Dan James
The hotel of precocious Mathilda (Natalie Portman), where she loses her family in a savage attack, 71 97th Street at Park Avenue on the Upper East Side, or so it seems.
Leon – The Professional filming location: Mathilda’s hotel: 71 97th Street on the Upper East Side, New York
The stairwells look just a little too expansive for the modest 97th Street building. The stairwell and corridors are those of the famous Hotel Chelsea, 222 West 23rd Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The Chelsea has far too much history to list here: Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001 while staying here, Andy Warhol filmed The Chelsea Girls, Bob Dylan wrote Sad Eyed lady of the Lowlands... and on.
Leon – The Professional filming location: the interior of Mathilda’s hotel: Hotel Chelsea, 222 West 23rd Street, New York
More recently, the Chelsea supplied the hotel room in which Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) discovers that he's not as totally heterosexual as he’d believed during an encounter with Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard) in Bill Condon's Kinsey.
The hotel is now probably best remembered in pop culture as the hotel in which Nancy Spungen died and Sid Vicious was arrested – see Alex Cox's Sid And Nancy, which filmed within the hotel.
It's not a five-star haven of luxury, in fact, it can be a little ramshackle, but that's the charm of the Chelsea – there really is nowhere quite like it.
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Leon – The Professional, 1994
Director
Cast
visit the film locations
New York: Flights: JFK Airport
Hotel Chelsea, 222 West 23rd Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues (tel: 212.243.3700)
Trivia
The Hotel Chelsea obviously features in Sid and Nancy, Alex Cox's exploration of the Sex Pistols phenomenon and the tragic fallout, and in Ethan Hawke’s Chelsea Walls, but did you spot its interior (again, as yet another hotel) in Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery?