Where Was ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Season 3 Filmed?

Season 3 of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” will bring fans back to Cousins Beach, the fictional seaside town that narrator Isabel “Belly” Conklin often calls her favorite place on Earth.

In the world of show, Cousins is set somewhere in the Northeast, and was inspired by places like Massachusetts’ Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard as well as the Hamptons in New York.

But the beach scenes were filmed in a place close to author Jenny Han’s heart: the coast of North Carolina. And with each new season, the world of the show has expanded as we follow characters to college and beyond.

Where Is Cousins Beach?

Throughout the show’s three seasons, “The Summer I Turned Pretty” has been filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina, a port city on the southern end of North Carolina’s coast. Beaches near Wilmington include Carolina Beach, Kure Beach and Wrightsville Beach.

Han, who wrote the original book trilogy the show is based on and serves as co-showrunner, told the Boston Globe in 2023 that Cousins was based on “a lot of the beaches I’ve been to in my life.”

“It’s mostly based on Cape Cod, but also, at that time, I was going to Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons. And it’s also based a little bit on the beach I went to growing up, which was Nags Head,” she said.

Nags Head is a beach on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, located about 200 miles from Wilmington.

Tom Everett Scott, who stars in the show as Conrad and Jeremiah’s dad, Adam Fisher, calls Wilmington “a great American beach town.”

“I live in California — there’s beautiful beaches there. But there’s something about that East Coast, walking through the sand dunes with the grass and the piers and the crystal blue water,” Scott tells TODAY.com. “The water is so warm.”

“Some of the cast were out there surfing, we’d go to the beach all the time,” he adds. “I think that’s my favorite beach now in the States.”

Where Were the Finch College Scenes Filmed?

Season 3 of “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” which premiered with two episodes on Prime Video July 16, opens with Belly (Lola Tung) and her boyfriend, Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalegno), as they finish up another semester at Finch College. The season features a four-year time jump, with the events occurring as Belly wraps up her junior year of college.

Finch College is not a real place, though the setting used for filming scenes there is.

Finch College was brought to life by author Jenny Han’s alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A member of the class of 2002, Han calls filming at UNC a “dream come true.” She tells TODAY.com one of their shooting locations, Old East, was her old dorm.

“I just remember in college, lying on that lawn outside of Old East, and my roommates’ stereo, and my favorite song is ‘Tangerine,’” Han tells TODAY.com. “And I would play that song and listen to it and look up at the stars — and I just never would have thought I’d be back there to film something, a story that I wrote.”

Chapel Hill is a small town in the middle of the state and one of the points of North Carolina’s bustling Research Triangle, which also consists of Raleigh’s North Carolina State University and Durham’s Duke University.

So far, the show has featured shots from across UNC’s campus, including the town’s main thoroughfare, Franklin Street, academic buildings like Pettigrew Hall and the campus’ quad.