[Now Filming] Josh Duhamel Says ‘Safe Haven’ is Not Just a Love Story

Josh Duhamel  promises that the much anticipated film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ best selling novel Safe Haven – now shooting in Southport, North Carolina – will not be your typical Hollywood love story.

Josh Duhamel

Duhamel recently told E! that Safe Haven will be much darker and more of a thriller than the previous decidedly romantic Sparks adaptations, specifically differentiating the film from the 2004 Sparks hit The Notebook.

“That movie (The Notebook) was great in its own right, but this is different,” Duhamel said. “It’s more of a  suspenseful kind of thriller.”

He compared Safe Haven to another thriller that was also filmed in North Carolina - the 1991 hit Sleeping With the Enemy, which stars Julia Roberts as a woman who fakes her own death in hopes of escaping her abusive husband, who eventually tracks her down anyway.

“I didn’t want it to just be a love story,” Duhamel said. “I wanted it to have  something different.”

Duhamel costars in Safe Haven with Julianne Hough (Rock of Ages, Footloose).

The 10 week shoot started filming last week in Southport.

Josh Duhamel in ‘Transformers: Dark of the Moon’

Safe Haven is an affirming and suspenseful story about a young woman’s struggle to find love again after she arrives in a small North Carolina town. Slowly, she begins putting down roots, and gains the courage to start a relationship with Alex, a widowed store owner with two young children.  But dark secrets intrude on her new life with such terror that she is forced to rediscover the meaning of sacrifice and rely on the power of love in this deeply moving romantic thriller

Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, The Cider House Rules) directs. Relativity previously teamed up with Hallstrom and Sparks on the 2010 box office hit Dear John. 

The plot is ”a young woman with a mysterious past lands in Southport, North Carolina where her bond with a widower forces her to confront the dark secret that haunts her”.

Southport also hosted the previous Sparks adaptation A Walk to Remember (2002).

You can find Safe Haven in theaters on February 8, 2013.

The movie adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks novel ‘Safe Haven’ is now filming in Southport, NC.

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