SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from Season 1 of “The Other Bennet Sister,” now streaming on BritBox.
Ella Bruccoleri may be playing a Bennet sister on TV, but the actress wasn’t always a fan of Jane Austen.
Bruccoleri read “Pride and Prejudice” for the first time when preparing to take on the lead role in the BBC drama “The Other Bennet Sister,” penned by Sarah Quintrell and adapted from Janice Hadlow’s novel of the same name. Playing Mary Bennet — Elizabeth’s younger and more timid sister — Bruccoleri set out to portray the coming of age story of a Regency woman.
“We wanted to make a show that Jane would enjoy if she were around today, or that was faithful enough to what she was trying to do,” Bruccoleri tells Variety.
The show’s dramatic romance and journey of self-growth seems to fit in line with something Austen would’ve imagined for her characters. Mary, overshadowed by her vivacious sisters and disparaging mother (Ruth Jones), begins to find her footing when she moves to London to nanny her cousins after her father’s death. In the new city, Mary lives with her aunt and uncle, the Gardiners, where she encounters a gentle lawyer named Tom Hayward (Dónal Finn), with whom she shares an immediate connection. While Tom is in a pre-exisisting romantic agreement, Mary crosses paths with Mr. Ryder (Laurie Davidson), a charming playboy who begins pursuing her (unbenowst to her). Familiar characters from “Pride and Prejudice” make appearances, such as the Ryder-besotted Caroline Bingley, who takes great pleasure in being cruel to Mary, as well as the the rest of the Bennet family, accompanied by flashes of Mr. Darcy refusing to spend time with his in-laws.
Worlds collide when Ryder follows Mary to Pemberley, but their friendship (as far as Mary is concerned) hits a snafu when he asks her to be his mistress. Mary returns to the Gardiners, and re-connects with a newly single Tom Hayward during a trip to the lakes — which is crashed by Ryder and Caroline Bingley.
A series of misunderstandings ensue, and Tom eventually leaves the lakes, seemingly for good. In his absence, Mary, who has grown into herself tremendously over the course of the season, continues to build a life for herself in London. She comes across Mr. Sparrow, an old friend whom she’d rejected; hashes out her issues with Caroline — and even finally addresses the way her mother has treated her.
In the last scenes of the finale, Tom returns to London (after Caroline’s persuades him to!) to confess his love for Mary, and admit he thought she loved Ryder instead. The two end the season engaged, and preparing for a life together.
First premiering on BBC in the U.K. earlier this year, “The Other Bennet Sister” moved to BritBox for a weekly streaming schedule in the U.S. and Canada. The interest carried over across contintents: “The Other Bennet Sister” show drove five times more new subscribers to the streamer in its first five weeks than any other series, helping achieve BritBox its strongest quarter yet in terms of subscriber growth.
It’s been so successful, in fact, that this week, BBC and BritBox announced “The Other Bennet Sister” will have a three-part Christmas special, to film this summer. Before that news broke, though, Bruccoleri expressed nervousness about the possibility of a second season. “When something has felt really perfect and is being received in a lovely way, I’m a bit scared of touching it again,” she said.
In the interview, Bruccoleri discusses portraying Mary’s anxious tendencies, carving her own path — and what’s next for Tom and Mary.
Centuries later, Jane Austen is still so popular, and Mary’s story of being an overlooked wallflower is something that still exists today. What do you hope that audiences who see themselves as Mary take away from the show?
Society’s message tells you that in order to fit in and be accepted, you have to make yourself look a certain way and appear polished. Mary goes on this journey where that message is so instilled within her that she finds it really difficult not to listen and thinks, “OK, I’m doing something wrong. I need to change the way I am in order to make people like me.” It doesn’t work, because Mary is who she is; she’s never going to be able to inhabit this box that other people want her to. Her flaws become her charms once she’s around people that accept her for who she is, which is the takeaway that I’d like people to have.
I noticed Mary picks at the skin around her thumb when she’s around her family and presumably nervous. What were some of the mannerisms that you incorporated to flesh her out?
It was scripted, actually! I loved that detail in the script, so I took that and ran with it. My makeup artist would — every day — do minimal prosthetics on my hands, around my nails to show this redness. We had to track where she was in her journey, because I wanted her to start doing that less as she went on. And also, I don’t wear glasses in real life, so I had to really think about when she would need them on, because it was kind of up to me. I would trawl through the script and be like, “How far away is this object?”
The Bennet matriarch is almost a cartoon villain in her parenting. Why do you feel that Mary kept trying with her? How did you and Ruth Jones approach filming those scenes, which are often really funny?
They were really hard to do, because I would just crack up a lot. Why does she keep trying with her is a good question, and a really heartbreaking thing to think about. Janice Hadlow speaks about it a lot in the book — this eternal need for approval from your parents, no matter how they are behaving with you, you still just desperately want to make them proud of you. If you haven’t achieved that, then you can’t find that within yourself. In the end, it’s that she doesn’t need approval to come from an external source. It can come from within. I like that the show doesn’t try to simplify it, because it’s such a complicated relationship people have with their parents, and even if it’s toxic, it’s really difficult to step away from it.
Do you wish grieving her father, with whom she seemed to get along better, was a bigger part of the show?
That was the one thing that I was sad to lose from the book. There’s some heartbreaking moments where Mary’s trying so hard to please him. She compiles this little book of quotes of his favorite authors, then realizes that is kind of mocking a lot of those authors, and she didn’t know and so she rips it up. There’s always more stuff that you would like to explore, but I think there just wasn’t a place for the way the show was written it.
You mentioned Mary’s glasses earlier. In the scene where she meets Tom, he puts on his own pair, and when they get engaged, the glasses are present again. Was that an intentional choice throughout the season?
Tom was always supposed to be the kind of male equivalent of Mary. The glasses were a really obvious way of telling that story, but it’s a sign of their intellect and the fact that they enjoy reading and poetry. And it was very intentional to have them on in that final romantic scene. We didn’t want to kind of like romanticize them aesthetically more and wanted a way of pushing back: They’re going to keep the glasses on, they’re going to look exactly the same as they have done throughout the rest of the series, and just as nerdy.
One of their most important scenes takes place on a boat ride that is interrupted by Ryder and ends up with both men in the lake. What was shooting that like?
That was a really good day on set. It had been quite an intense day of filming, because they had some problems with rooting the boats to the bottom of the lake or something. We didn’t start filming until after lunch, and everyone was really stressed. We got out onto the boat to do those scenes, and Indira [Varma, who plays Mrs. Gardiner] turned up in a swimming costume and a hat with a duck on top, so that she could go for a swim in the lake. And if it was caught on camera, she thought it wouldn’t matter, because she had a duck on the top of the hat. And everyone was just like, “We don’t have time to deal with this right now,” and were trying to stop Indira from jumping into the lake. But then when we did the scenes with like Dónal and Laurie, bless their hearts, it was freezing cold. You have a medic on hand, but [ours] was very over-cautious. He kept on saying that he thought they were going to get pneumonia. It was really, really funny. And then Dónal lost one of his sideburns in the lake!
Did you feel like it was important for Mary to have another love interest before eventually ending up with Tom?
It adds another layer for the show to have a slight will they/won’t they, even though everyone knows that she’s gonna end up with Mr. Haywood. But I think personally, for Mary, it is important, because she needs to have a sense of other people out there. Her relationship with Mr. Ryder is so formative in so many ways, and she learns so much about herself. It’s important for her to see that, but it’s not what love is for her, in order to know that she’s in love with Tom.
In the last episode, specifically, she makes a lot of really good choices, like rejecting Ryder. She sees Sparrow again. She stands up to her mom. She has that tea with Caroline. Were there any scenes that were particularly satisfying for you to film?
The scene with her mom. Very much. Ruth and I spent most of the day filming it like we were doing a little mini play in the living room. We kept on doing it and finding new things. It’s just a really satisfying one, because it sums up the place that Mary’s arrived at, which is that she wasn’t reliant on her mother anymore, is capable of making her own decisions, and she trusts herself to do that. She’s completely empowered in that moment, and she owns the things that she says to her mom. And also meeting John Sparrow on the bench. It doesn’t really come across in the show at all, but in the book, Mary holds on to the guilt of John Sparrow, constantly revisits it in her mind, and can’t move past the guilt. Can’t move past the fact that she might have hurt this other person — she hopes that he’s OK, and seeing that he’s happy, it’s like a big full circle moment for her.
Another big moment in the finale is Tom and Mary finally getting engaged and married off-screen. What do you see them doing after the finale?
I’ve sort of toyed with this in my mind and thought, would they have children, or is that not for them? Because Mary is not naturally very maternal. She develops friendships with the kids once she lets her guard down a bit, but I think it would be like a big decision for her. I can see them having this beautiful, equitable, quite progressive relationship for the time, where they both make decisions equally, and prioritize each other’s happiness. And I can see Mary continuing with her governessing. The last bit of the show is when Sarah was really up and down on whether it should be Mary writing a book. Because it was like, “Is it too obvious?” That she becomes a sort of Jane Austen figure, and ends up writing for other people. It felt really important to me that Mary wanted to pass something on that she’d learned being a young woman, so I think she would want to pass that on in some way. I could see them being happy together and living a kind of bohemian London life.
This interview has been edited and condensed.