‘Pride and Prejudice’: See Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden’s Smoldering Take on Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy

Sebastian Armesto as Mr. Gardiner, Anjana Vasan as Mrs. Gardiner, and Emma Corrin as Elizabeth Bennet.

But those predecessors weren’t in showrunner Dolly Alderton’s mind as she sat down to craft her interpretation of Jane Austen’s most fiercely adored novel. She instead found inspiration in a less traditional Pride and Prejudice. “The one adaptation that I did reference and I found really useful was Bridget Jones,” says Alderton. Not because her version of Lizzy lip-synchs “All by Myself” or accidentally makes blue soup, but because that 2001 film really understands the character of Wickham—the dashing ne’er-do-well Lizzy is drawn toward before she falls for Darcy.

In the novel, says Alderton, “characters were often talking about how charming he was.” But in her estimation, Austen didn’t spend much time actively showing Wickham’s charm or ease of conversation. “The only examples we really saw of his conversation was him complaining about Darcy, being a bit whingey. I was like, I really need to fool the audience into thinking that he’s the guy that Lizzy should be with.”

Corrin and Matthew Duckett as Colonel Fitzwilliam.

The answer lay in Bridget Jones, which reimagines Wickham as the seductive Daniel Cleaver—Bridget’s bad news boss. As Alderton, a novelist herself, explains, “Cleaver lures Bridget in by making her feel like he’s a safe place to land, to gossip about this person that they both hate”—Colin Firth’s standoffish Mark Darcy. “He’s emulated the language of female intimacy to create a false sense of safety in his company. And there was something of Daniel Cleaver’s mischief and playfulness that plays so opposite against what’s perceived as the stiffness of Darcy that I thought was really useful.” So Alderton infused her Wickham with those qualities. Louis Partridge, who plays the role in the new series, feels like a worthy successor to Hugh Grant.

That case study sums up Alderton’s approach to one of the most frequently adapted works in English literature. Her Pride and Prejudice is both artful and thoughtful, a six-episode series that shows deep respect for its source material while teasing out some of the novel’s less obvious threads—with the help of an uncommonly good cast, some of whom can be seen in character for the first time in these exclusive images. The show’s heart and soul may not actually be Corrin’s Elizabeth or Lowden’s Darcy, but instead the marriage-minded Mrs. Bennet, a character whose overwhelming drive to get her five daughters hitched makes her easy to dismiss.

Daryl McCormack as Mr. Bingley, asking Freya Mavor’s Jane to dance.

When one reads Pride and Prejudice as a teen or a 20-something, it’s easy to get swept up in the romance. If you reread it in your mid-30s, though, you may come to the same realization Alderton did: “Mrs. Bennet’s kind of the hero of the whole fucking thing.” Alderton thinks Elizabeth’s mother has never gotten the credit she deserves: “I really felt I’d like justice for Mrs. Bennet,” she says.

Mrs. Bennet needs to help her daughters find husbands not because she’s in cahoots with the patriarchy or because she’s shallowly obsessed with appearances, but because it’s a critical economic imperative. Alderton wrote a poignant scene in which, during the show’s second episode, Mrs. Bennet explains this to her husband. “This is actually really serious, and you shouldn’t be laughing at me,” the showrunner says, paraphrasing the gist of her speech. “You should be recognizing how much I love my children.”

It’s a good monologue, made even better by its delivery from Olivia Colman. The Oscar winner was Alderton’s first and only choice for the role. “I wrote an unbelievably emotional love letter to Olivia, begging her to play Mrs. Bennet, because I knew that our Mrs. Bennet couldn’t be played by anyone else,” the showrunner says. No other actor, she says, has Colman’s ability to “ping-pong, in this really effortless and very genuine way, from very high comedy to very real emotional truth. And that’s really the magic of Austen.”

Siena Kelly and Saffron Coomber as Mr. Bingley’s sisters, Caroline Bingley and Louisa Hurst.

Colman has an ideal foil in Rufus Sewell, who plays Mr. Bennet—a character who, on the page, may seem bemused by his wife at best, and contemptuous of her at worst. Alderton, though, chose to portray their union as one that’s essentially happy. “I think a lot of people think it is an antagonistic marriage,” she says. “But for me, they felt like a very recognizable British couple who are extremely comfortable with each other and deeply fond of each other. And how that deep familiarity is expressed is with relentless mockery, its own expression of love.” After all, she adds, the pair did have five children together in very quick succession—“so I’m sure they liked each other a bit.”

Charming as the elder Bennets may be, every iteration of Pride and Prejudice rests upon the actors who play its central couple. As with Colman, Alderton was certain early on that Corrin and Lowden were the two performers for the job. “Emma can balance that very difficult Lizzy combination of emotional depth and vulnerability and wit and sharpness. Emma’s a very, very, very intelligent person, and I think that’s what you need for Lizzy.”

Corrin as Lizzy, considering a letter.

Lowden, meanwhile, seemed up to the task of playing a notoriously tricky part—a man who seems irredeemably cold and snobbish until Elizabeth visits his estate and discovers how differently Darcy acts when he’s comfortable in his surroundings.

“You have to see a lot of complexity, which means that when we see the real him—when we visit him in Pemberley and we see his gentleness and his loyalty and his protectiveness and his kindness—he doesn’t suddenly feel like a stranger,” Alderton says. “You need a really, really robust actor. You need a really, really muscular actor. That’s what Jack is. And of course, he is also all those things that we need Darcy to be: He’s handsome, he’s sexy, he’s masculine, he’s gallant. So it was a no-brainer, really.”

Is there perhaps another handsome, sexy, masculine, iconically British character she’d like to see him play next? Alderton laughs. “I think my answer is ‘no comment.’”

Fiona Shaw as Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

She’s more open about other things, like the research she did while writing the series—with assists from Professor Fiona Stafford, an Oxford literature professor, and another huge name in Austenland: Emma Thompson, who wrote and starred in Ang Lee’s gold standard adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. When they met before the new Pride and Prejudice started shooting, Thompson gave Alderton some key advice: “You cannot underestimate how important the indicators of class and etiquette are within your scenes. They are so much more than just intricacies of a period drama. They’re a language that signifies some of the most important parts of this time of history.”

There’s strong attention to detail in the final product, every episode of which was directed by Euros Lyn, a veteran of British TV. But there’s also a strong vein of humor—which you’d expect to see from Alderton, whose previous work includes the National Book Award–winning memoir Everything I Know About Love and the best-selling comedic novel Good Material—as well as a sensual current.

Lowden’s Mr. Darcy with his sister Georgiana, played by Isabella Sermon.