One Night Only imagines a world where premarital sex is legal for just one night each year—and condoms are mandatory. The rom-com follows Allie (Monica Barbaro), a musician stuck writing jingles, and Owen (Callum Turner), a recently dumped pizza-shop owner, as their paths repeatedly collide across the city in a single chaotic evening. What starts as two people trying to get laid turns into a tour of Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, with encounters that reveal how appearances can deceive.
Director Will Gluck, a native New Yorker known for Easy A and Anyone But You, leaned into his hometown knowledge when staging the film. He prioritized believable geography and recognizable but underused corners of the city, calling on friends from the local comedy scene to populate the world—Mike Birbiglia plays a comic cop, Ziwe shows up as a bouncer, and others appear in memorable small roles. Gluck wanted locations that felt real to someone who grew up here while still allowing the story to move fast and logically across neighborhoods.
Upper West Side
The fictional Claremont’s Pizza, where Owen works, is named for the street near Gluck’s childhood home. Scenes meant to be inside Claremont’s were shot instead at The Original Ray’s Pizza on 82nd and Columbus Avenue. Although the film suggests the pizzeria sits farther uptown in the Heights, the Ray’s location stands in for Owen’s neighborhood hub throughout the movie.
The Heights (Hamilton, Washington, Morningside)
Owen is often at his mother Linda’s elegant Hamilton Heights brownstone, a setting that underscores his closeness to family. The film places them near West 141st and Alexander Hamilton’s old stomping grounds. Small local details were used for authenticity: a neighborhood pharmacy (a place Gluck’s parents frequented) becomes the site of a failed attempt to improvise protection, and an urgent-care sequence was filmed in a space that is actually a veterinarian’s office. Gluck deliberately scouted these residential blocks to find the right lived-in feel.
Lower Manhattan
Much of the nightlife action unfolds in Lower Manhattan, where Allie and Owen seek hookups and run-ins. A swanky members-only lounge scene was shot at Chez Margaux in Chelsea, located near the Whitney and the High Line. Owen flirts with a bartender at the historic White Horse Tavern in the West Village, and a frantic hunt for a condom leads to a showdown in a SoHo bodega, where Allie and Owen argue with the shop owner over the last available box. Electric Lady Studios in the West Village doubles for a recording-studio rendezvous, and although Allie’s Lower East Side apartment is part of the story, that set was actually built on a Brooklyn soundstage.
Long Island City
A later sequence takes Allie to a sprawling apartment in Queens, filmed at the Foundry in Long Island City. The industrial venue, with its exposed brick and dramatic rooms, stands in for the conman’s luxury pad; another Foundry space also serves as the interior of a club later in the film. Gluck points out that when a character runs off a balcony in that scene, the 59th Street Bridge is visible in the background, anchoring the location in Queens.
Brooklyn
Owen’s misadventures lead him across the river by Citi Bike to Brooklyn Bridge Park, where a date devolves into a public-embarrassment incident that ultimately brings both protagonists to the same police station. The film converted an old metal factory into that police set. For the exterior of a Greenpoint club, the production used a warehouse on Kingsland Avenue, with Ziwe portraying the intimidating bouncer outside.
The Little Red Lighthouse
The movie’s final, tender moment takes place at the Little Red Lighthouse in Fort Washington Park, a small but striking landmark beneath the George Washington Bridge. Gluck says he spent time there as a kid and wanted to share the spot; its storybook quality makes it a fitting backdrop for Allie and Owen’s eventual reconciliation.
Throughout One Night Only, New York itself is a character: familiar landmarks, neighborhood-specific touches, and lesser-seen pockets of the city provide texture and plausibility to a premise that’s wildly imagined. Gluck’s insistence on geography and his choice to film in real local spaces—often ones connected to his own memories—help the film move quickly across borough lines while keeping the setting grounded and recognizable.
