Due to the inevitable deviation of the casting process, the dimensional error of the turbine blade is introduced. As a result, the location datum of the film cooling holes is changed, which has an impact on the machining accuracy. The majority of pertinent studies concentrate on the rigid location approach for the entire blade, which results in a modest relative position error of the blade surface but still fails to give the exact position and axial direction of the film cooling holes of the deformed blade. In this paper, the entire deformation of the blade cross-section curve is divided into a number of deformation combinations of the mean line curve based on the construction method of the blade design intent. The exact location of the film cooling holes in the turbine blade with deviation is therefore efficiently solved by a flexible deformation of the blade that optimises the position and axial direction of the holes. The verification demonstrates that the novel method can significantly reduce both the contour deviation of the blade surface and the location issue of the film cooling holes. After machining experiments, the maximum position deviation of the holes is reduced by approximately 80% compared to the rigid location method of the entire blade, and the average value and standard deviation are also decreased by about 70%. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2024.