Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest Sits on Serbia's Rudnik
Jelena Gavrilovic plays the goddess Goda in Robin Hood, a series shot entirely in Serbia. The crew found Sherwood on Rudnik and Fruska Gora, and the costume show in Belgrade now runs to August 30.
When an actress says she only turns up once the hero is in real trouble, her job sits somewhere between fate and the weather forecast. Jelena Gavrilovic plays Goda in Robin Hood, a secretive goddess who appears among the trees, and those trees are not English ones. The production found its Sherwood Forest on Rudnik and on Fruska Gora.
The first season was shot entirely in Serbia, and that is the fact Gavrilovic puts ahead of everything else when she talks about the job.
“The series was filmed entirely in our country and we are very proud of that. We have fantastic locations, because Sherwood Forest is not an easy thing to find.”
The whole logic of a production like this one is packed into that sentence. The legend of the outlaw from Nottingham does not require England. It requires dense deciduous woodland that holds up on camera through fog and through a chase, at a price that does not swallow the budget.
Why did Sherwood end up on Rudnik?
Because the story needs unbroken forest the camera can travel deep into, and the ranges of Rudnik and Fruska Gora offer exactly that. Gavrilovic also points out that none of this started last summer.
“Thanks to Ana Ilic, who is also the mind behind Lozionica, Serbia established itself as a very interesting film destination maybe a decade ago.”
MGM+ and Lionsgate are behind the series, with Jonathan English as creator and director. Jack Patten takes the title role, and the cast includes Connie Nielsen and Sean Bean, who plays the Sheriff of Nottingham. The Serbian half of the ensemble is not background filler:
- Tamara Radovanovic, who plays Selin
- Matija Gredic
- Mihajlo Lazic
- Paul Leonard Murray
- Boban Marjanovic
- Nikola Jankovic, Milos Cvetkovic, Milos Timotijevic, Milica Vrzic and Marjan Tasic
A part that is not played like a person
Goda has no biography, no home address and no motive that can be summed up in two lines. She is a function of the story, the thing that shows up in medieval material once the hero loses his bearings. Gavrilovic describes it without any mystique.
“My role is very specific. I am mostly on forest locations and I appear when Robin Hood is having a hard time.”
That is harder than it sounds, because there is no partner to build the scene with through dialogue. The presence has to work on its own, through the frame and through the body.
“Once you become part of that fantastical world, it is completely different from playing a realistic character.”
Then there is the part of the work that never makes it into the trailers. Shooting outdoors means the schedule follows the light, the rain and the temperature, not the actor.
“Whenever you shoot exteriors, it is a fight with nature.”
The Belgrade exhibition has been extended
The companion show, Robin Hood in Serbia, opened at Belgrade’s Lozionica on June 6, 2026, with British Ambassador to Serbia Edward Ferguson among the guests at the opening. It was announced then to close at the end of June. It now runs to August 30, daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The extension is the only publicly available signal of how the show has done with visitors.
On display are original costumes, props, weapons and sections of the Sherwood Forest set, along with stills from the shoot. What passes on screen in three seconds stands here within arm’s reach, and that is where the exhibition earns its keep: it shows how much of the work came out of local workshops.
We have written about this production before, when Sean Bean returned to Serbia and had good things to say about Belgrade. What has shifted since is the angle. This is no longer only a story about a foreign star working here. It is a story about one of England’s best known myths acquiring a Serbian address, and that address is Rudnik.
