For my tenth birthday, my dad bought me a full set of emerald green, leather-bound Jane Austen novels. For many years, those books and the characters in them were my dear friends. But Elinor and Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility occupied a particularly special place—Elinor, the eldest sister, is written to be ruled by logic and reserve, while Marianne is driven by passion and sensation.
Cue: Inside me there are two wolves. I always felt like a wayward Marianne in this life, moved by nature and art and feeling to the point of tears, (what would have been seen as “indelicate” expression in Regency times). As someone who would later be diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, I found a kind of communion in this young woman swept away by the grandiosity of her emotions.
Her lessons later became my own. While the 1995 film adaptation of Sense & Sensibility—starring Emma Thompson, pre-Titanic Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, and Hugh Grant, to name a few—will remain one of my most-watched films of all time, I was chomping at the bit to see what new life could be breathed into this seminal novel through Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles in the new movie adaptation, now in theaters. From a sunny Regency set in London to my Zoom window in New York City, we sat down to talk about how Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles embodied their characters, how Austen is a part of the very fabric of English existence, and what true Janeites can really sink their teeth into in their new film.
Teen Vogue: Tell me about the audition process. How did you first hear about the project? Daisy Edgar-Jones: I first heard about the project [when] my agent told me that Georgia Oakley and Working Title were going to adapt Sense [and Sensibility] again.
And I was like, "Oh my gosh, anything you can do to put me in the ring would be amazing." I got a general meeting with Georgia and it was just meant to be a general meeting to kind of get to know her and talk about film, and I got a call the next day that she wanted to offer me the part. It was sort of an audition that I didn't even really realize. I got sent the script and I read it immediately in an hour and just fell in love with it: Diana's adaptation, Georgia's moodboard, and I was so excited.
And so obviously my first major question was “Who is going to be Marianne Dashwood?” And Georgia [said there was] “one person that we want and it's Esmé.” And I was like, “No way I know Esmé,” because we worked together on one of my first jobs when I was 19 and Esmé was 17. And then we had a chemistry read and it was magic. TV: What was the chemistry read you two did?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
