26 Locations From Movies & TV I Had No Idea Were Actually Iceland

The "mountain like an arrowhead" from Game of Thrones is really Kirkjufell Mountain, one of the most photographed locations in Iceland.

Also featured in the show are:

Skaftafell Nature Reserve — North of the Wall

Grjótagjá Hot Spring Cave — Where Jon Snow and Ygritte get it on

Dimmuborgir — An area where Sam is attacked by white walkers

Thingvellir National Park — Brienne vs. the Hound

Svínafellsjökull Glacier — Called "Hollywood's Favorite Glacier" (you'll see why as this list goes on), this location partially served as the Wall itself

Although The Northman mainly takes place in Iceland, most of its scenes were shot in Northern Ireland. But you can't get ice this cinematic outside of Iceland.

Watch it on Peacock.

Pictured above is Die Another Day, when Bond goes to the Ice Palace. As with many of these movies and TV shows, it can be tough to tell what's directly shot on location, what's a green screen, and what's a mixture of both. It's pretty safe to say that the tsunami surfing scene leaned more toward CGI, though.

Like the Svínafellsjökull glacier, Iceland's black sand beaches are also going to pop up on throughout this list a lot. The sand's color is due to the island's volcanic activity, and the most famous (and most often-filmed) beach is near the village of Vík.

The otherworldly volcanic sand looks even more alien when you put a crop of lush greenery on top like in Rogue One.

Big sci-fi movies are good at stitching together beautiful vistas from all over the earth, throwing in a dash of CGI trickery, and creating entirely new worlds. So while it's tough to say exactly which parts of the Starkiller Base in The Force Awakens are Iceland, the production did confirm that they filmed near the Krafla volcano.

Everyone's favorite photogenic slab of ice is back, this time posing as Bhutan in South Asia. Bruce Wayne has to trek across the ice to find Ra's al Ghul, and the sharp peaks of this glacier certainly make the trip look dangerous.

Later in the movie, when Bruce Wayne and Ra's al Ghul have a sword fight on a frozen lake, they are also standing on Svínafellsjökull.

Christopher Nolan was such a big fan of Svínafellsjökull that he even came back a few years later for Interstellar. One of the most frequently-seen posters for Interstellar featured Matthew McConaughey's character standing on an ice planet. He was really on good-old Svínafellsjökull, which helped create the planet so cold even its clouds freeze.

Iceland is still experiencing the boom in tourism that came from the release of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I'm serious, if you tracked how often people were searching "visit Iceland" over the past decade, you'd see it start to rise around 2013 (when the movie was released). But who would track something so random, that's crazy.

The town of Stykkishólmur is the town in which Mitty decides to get on the helicopter as Kristen Wiig sings "Space Oddity," but many more scenes were shot in the country. Other locations include:

Seyðisfjörður — Walter Mitty swaps out his bike for a longboard and absolutely shreds

Vatnajökull National Park — Masking as the Himalayas and Afghanistan

Grundarfjörður — The boat harbor

Höfn — The town Mitty lands in, pretending to be Greenland in the movie

Charlize Theron's dreadlocks weren't the only thing appropriated in The Fate of the Furious — so was Lake Mývatn. In the movie, the family needs to go to Russia. But the frozen lake that the nuclear submarine bursts through is actually in Iceland!

The Tree of Life has a lot of scenes showing a barren earth, whether it's just beginning as a new planet or a representation of the afterlife. Iceland is great at doing "barren," and the area surrounding the Krafla Volcano was perfect.

The film also shot some scenes at Námafjall, a geothermal area.

In this movie, the filmmakers didn't have to make up a sci-fi setting or pretend that Iceland was somewhere else. That's because Jules Verne wrote into his book Journey to the Center of the Earth that the volcanic tube leading inside our planet was actually at Snæfellsjökull. In the movie, they were true to the book and shot on location.

This time pretending to be Siberia, you may remember the area surrounding Vík as having black sand beaches. Well, that's just one side. In Iceland, you can drive 20 minutes and feel like you're on a completely different planet. So right near those beaches are rocky stretches that, when covered in snow and ice, look a lot like the unforgiving terrain of Siberia.

Perfect spot to get a hike in, maybe a road trip, create a tormented super soldier, you know.

On the Strandir coast in the Northwest of Iceland lies Djúpavík, a small fishing village. In Justice League, this is where Aquaman is hiding out. And those are real chunks of ice floating behind Jason Momoa. If there was ever a time to nail your performance on the first take, it's standing in freezing-cold water in Djúpavík.

Pictured on the left is the Langjökull glacier mountain range, but Marvel has not officially stated where in Iceland they shot part of the latest Doctor Strange. With so many vistas consisting of snowy mountaintops, odds are they had just as many locations to choose from as there are multiverses.

Skógafoss is a waterfall tucked into a cliffside that almost feels like CGI when you're standing right next to it. But the crashing water is a reminder that even though Iceland's real pretty, it's also powerful. In Vikings, Floki goes to Skógafoss in the show's fifth season.

When I think of the Blade Runner world, my mind immediately goes to the cluttered streets, tightly packed together buildings, and neon lights. But at the beginning of Blade Runner 2049, more of the landscape surrounding futuristic Los Angeles is shown. Bleak yet beautiful? Sounds like Iceland!

The hills of Iceland play a large role in Lamb, not necessarily in the movie's plot but in its atmosphere. The looming cliffs feel like walls, boxing in the characters in this small and creepy story. The mountain range outside the city of Akureyri was just what the filmmakers needed to maximize the feeling that something bad could come at any minute.

Diamond Beach is not only full of small icebergs that have washed ashore — it's also a black sand beach! Though, to be fair, pretty much all of the beaches in Iceland have black sand. The mini-glaciers (aka "diamonds") on this beach are carried from Vatnajökull (the second largest glacier in Europe) by the Jökulsárlón lagoon's waters.

The Kermóafoss waterfall is in the picture on the left, but the trees above are what the filmmakers behind Thor: The Dark World were more interested in. A battle on "Vanaheim" really takes place right outside Reykjavík, near the Kermóafoss.

Foundation has filmed all over Europe, including Germany, Malta, Spain, and Ireland. Like Star Wars, the sci-fi show stitches together many of these different regions into a wholly unique world. So while the filmmakers haven't explicitly stated which scenes were shot in which areas of Iceland, it's safe to bet the black sand beaches were involved at one point.

Part of Vatnajökull (the second-largest glacier in Europe) is Virkisjökull. It's got plenty of caves and crevices that look great on camera, but according to Chris Pratt, the glacier had never been filmed on before The Tomorrow War. Though since it's part of a national park, it's probably best that too many film crews don't poke around these ice caps.

Another alien planet, another trip to Iceland. This time we're near Dettifoss, another silver medalist. Remember how I said Vatnajökull is Europe's second largest glacier? Well, Dettifoss is the second most powerful waterfall in all of Europe. Iceland just can't get a #1 spot.

The black sand beaches are back, and this time, they brought a rock arch. Dyrhólaey is on the south shore of Iceland, and there's even a quaint lighthouse nearby.

Hrossaborg means "Horse Castle." That is all.

Many of the land formations in Iceland have myths surrounding their creation, so it's no surprise that King Arthur, the granddaddy of myths about rocks (and swords in them), would venture to Iceland.

I know, it's not a movie or a TV show. But these days, there's not much difference anyway. On the left is the Sólheimasandur plane wreck near Vík, and what appears to be a lava field from the video game is shown on the right. The game's director, Hideo Kojima, visited Iceland in 2014 and was clearly inspired.