Thu 26 Feb 2026 06.00 EST Last modified on Thu 26 Feb 2026 06.50 EST Share Silo’s most iconic feature is a giant spiral staircase. Photograph: Apple Unlike Fallout’s horizontally sprawling bunkers, the vertical arrangement of the silo, in which the elites occupy the upper levels while the workers are housed down below, makes the power imbalance particularly stark. The show’s most iconic feature is a giant spiral staircase. (Lifts, apparently, have gone out of fashion by the 25th century.) When characters ascend to the upper levels they have to drag themselves up thousands of heavy concrete steps. “We were inspired by Brutalist apartment blocks,” production designer Gavin Bocquet tells me. “In the early Soviet cities they were cut off from the rest of the world, but they still had restaurants and bars and things, and they didn’t really know any different.” Initially hoping to film on location, Bocquet visited famous Brutalist buildings in London, including the National Theatre and the Barbican Centre (the latter served as the Coruscant underworld in Andor), and even an abandoned apartment block in South Africa. “We looked at lots of sites,” he says, “but none of them was quite right. In the end we had to build it ourselves. We didn’t have a mile-high silo, but we built a 45-foot one.” Finding a sound-stage that could accommodate such a huge set was challenging. Eventually, Bocquet settled on a former freezer-plant in Hoddesdon. “This was during the Covid lockdowns,” he recalls. “We were masked up, and testing every morning, and for about a year we were isolated in this giant dark space. I think it probably helped subliminally – we really felt like we were living underground.” With construction on the staircase under way, author Howey was invited to the set. “He started crying,” Bocquet remembers. “He was physically walking up this thing that he had imagined years earlier.” “It was overwhelming,” Howey tells me. “They’d built three storeys of the silo to full scale, strong enough to support hundreds of actors at a time. To go from being a solitary writer making something up in my own mind, to seeing this group of people working together to build it, was one of the most emotional experiences of my life.” Impressive as it may be, however, the Silo set holds little appeal for the cast of Paradise, who film their own supposedly underground scenes outside on the Paramount backlot, with the California sun beating down on them. “I will say I much prefer our bunker!” laughs Krys Marshall. “Ours is a glam bunker. Theirs looks like it’s just a hair above hell.” Leave it to the billionaires to make surviving the apocalypse look so good. Explore more on these topics