Spoiler Alert: This story contains spoilers for Season 1 of “The Other Bennet Sister,” now available on BritBox.
Ella Bruccolelli may play the Bennet sisters on TV, but she wasn’t necessarily a fan of Jane Austen.
Bruccolelli first read Pride and Prejudice when he was preparing to play the lead role in the BBC drama The Other Bennet Sister, written by Sarah Quintrell and based on the novel of the same name by Janice Hadlow. Bruccolelli, who played Elizabeth’s timid sister Mary Bennet, sought to tell the coming-of-age story of a woman during the Regency era.
“We wanted to create a show that Jane would enjoy if she were there today, or one that was true enough to what she was trying to do,” Bruccolelli told Variety.
The show’s dramatic romance and journey of self-growth seem to be in line with what Austen would have imagined for her characters. Overshadowed by her cheerful sisters and despised mother (Ruth Jones), Mary begins to find her footing when she moves to London to nurse her cousin after her father’s death. In her new town, Mary lives with her uncle and aunt, the Gardiners, where she meets a kind lawyer named Tom Hayward (Donal Finn) and they quickly hit it off. While Tom is already engaged in a romantic relationship, Mary passes by an attractive playboy, Mr. Ryder (Laurie Davidson), who (unbeknownst to her) begins to pursue her. Familiar characters from Pride and Prejudice appear, including the Rider-obsessed Caroline Bingley, who takes great pleasure in being cruel to Mary, and the rest of the Bennet family, and we see flashes of Mr. Darcy, who refuses to spend time with his in-laws.
Worlds collide when Ryder follows Mary to Pemberley, but as far as Mary is concerned, their friendship is thrown into turmoil when Ryder asks her to be his mistress. Mary returns to the Gardiner household and reunites with bachelor Tom Hayward during a trip to the lake, but is involved in an accident at the hands of Ryder and Caroline Bingley.
A series of misunderstandings ensues, and Tom eventually leaves the lake for what seems like forever. In his absence, Mary grows significantly into herself over the course of the season and continues to build a life for herself in London. She meets Mr. Sparrow, an old friend she had rejected. He clarifies the problem with Caroline, and finally touches on the way his mother treats her.
In the finale’s final scene, Tom returns to London (after being persuaded by Caroline!) to confess his love to Mary and admits that he thought she loved Ryder. After the season ends, the two get engaged and begin preparing to live together.
“The Other Bennet Sister,” which first aired on the BBC in the U.K. earlier this year, has moved to BritBox to begin a weekly streaming schedule in the U.S. and Canada. Interest carried over across continents, with “The Other Bennet Sister” show bringing five times more new subscribers to the streamer than any other series in its first five weeks, helping BritBox achieve its strongest quarter ever in terms of subscriber growth.
In fact, it has been so successful that this week the BBC and Britbox announced that The Other Bennett Sister will be filmed as a three-part Christmas special this summer. However, before the news broke, Bruccolelli expressed concerns about the possibility of a second season. “When something feels really perfect and accepted in a nice way, I’m a little scared to touch it again,” she said.
In the interview, Bruccolelli talks about portraying Mary’s anxious tendencies, forging her own path, and what’s next for Tom and Mary.
Centuries later, Jane Austen is still very popular, and the story of Mary, an overlooked wallflower, still exists today. What do you hope audiences who think of themselves as Mary take away from this show?
Society’s message is that in order to fit in and be accepted, you have to look a certain way and appear sophisticated. Mary continues on this journey, but the message is so deeply ingrained in her that it becomes really hard not to listen and think, “Okay, I’m doing something wrong. I need to change who I am to get people to like me.” That doesn’t work because Mary is who she is. She will never be able to live in this box that others want her to have. Her flaws become her charm when she’s around people who accept her for who she is. That’s the point I want people to take away.
I noticed that Mary would pick the skin around her thumb when she was with her family, perhaps when she was nervous. What mannerisms did you incorporate to flesh out her?
In fact, it was written in the script! I liked that detail in the script, so I took it and ran with it. My makeup artist applied minimal prosthetics around my hands and nails each day to capture this redness. We needed to track where she was on her journey. Because I wanted her to have less of that as she progressed. Plus, I don’t wear glasses in real life, so I had to seriously think about when she would need to wear them. Because in a way it was up to me. I scanned the script and thought, “How far away is this object?”
The Bennet matriarch is almost a comic villain in raising children. Why do you think Mary kept trying so hard for her?There are so many funny scenes, how did you and Ruth Jones approach filming them?
It was very difficult. Why she keeps trying with her is a good question, but it’s really heartbreaking to think about. Janice Hadlow talks about it many times in her book. An eternal desire for approval from your parents, no matter how they act towards you, you still desperately want them to be proud of you. If you haven’t achieved it, you won’t find it within yourself. After all, she doesn’t need approval from external sources. It can come from within. I like that this drama doesn’t try to simplify it. Because it’s a very complicated relationship that people have with their parents, and it’s really hard to walk away from that, even if it’s toxic.
Do you wish grieving for her father, with whom she seemed to get along better, had been a bigger part of the show?
That was the only thing I regret missing from this book. There are some heartbreaking moments as Mary tries so hard to please him. She compiled this little book of quotes from his favorite authors, but she realized that it mocked many writers, and she didn’t know it, so she tore it up. There’s always something more I’d like to explore, but I think the way the show was written didn’t leave room for it.
You mentioned Mary’s glasses earlier. In the scene where she meets Tom, he wears his glasses, and when the two get engaged, the glasses are present again. Was that a deliberate choice throughout the season?
Tom was always considered to be the male equivalent of Mary. The glasses were a very obvious way to tell that story, but it’s a sign of their intelligence and the fact that they enjoy reading and poetry. And wearing them in the final romantic scene was very intentional. We didn’t want to make them even more aesthetically romantic, we wanted a way to be repulsive. They’re going to keep their glasses on and look exactly the same and just as geeky as they’ve been doing throughout the rest of the series.
One of their most important scenes takes place on a boat, but is interrupted by the rider and they both end up falling into the lake. What was it like filming?
It was a really good day on set. It was a pretty intense day of filming as we had some issues getting the boat to root on the bottom of the lake or something. The shooting started after lunch, so everyone was very stressed. We went out on a boat to capture those scenes. And Indira (Varma, who plays Mrs. Gardiner) shows up wearing a bathing suit and a hat with a duck on it so she can go swimming in the lake. And even if it was caught on camera, she thought it wouldn’t matter because she had a duck on the hat. And everyone was trying to stop Indira from jumping into the lake, like, “We don’t have time to deal with this right now.” But when we shot scenes like Donal and Rory, it was freezing cold. You have a doctor on hand, but (our doctor) has become very cautious. He kept saying he thought he might get pneumonia. It was really really interesting. And Donal lost one of his sideburns in the lake!
Did you feel it was important for Mary to have another love interest before ultimately ending up with Tom?
Even though we all know she ends up with Mr. Heywood in the end, it adds another layer to give the show a bit of willpower. But I personally think it’s important for Mary. Because she needs to have a sense of the other people there. Her relationship with Mr. Ryder is very formative in many ways, and she learns a lot about herself. It’s important for her to understand that, but for her to know that she’s in love with Tom, it’s not love for her.
She made a lot of really good choices, especially in the last episode, like rejecting Ryder. She met Sparrow again. She confronts her mother. She drinks the tea with Caroline. Was there a scene you were particularly happy about filming?
Scene with mom. very. Ruth and I spent most of the day photographing in our living room as if we were playing a little miniature garden. We kept doing it and found new things. This is really satisfying. Because it sums up where Mary has gotten to, which is that she no longer relies on her mother, that she can make her own decisions and believes that she can do it on her own. In that moment, she is completely empowered and owns what she tells her mother. He also meets John Sparrow on the bench. Although it is not conveyed at all in the drama, in the book Mary carries with her the guilt of John Sparrow and is constantly reminded of it in her mind, unable to move away from that guilt. I can’t get over the fact that she may have hurt this person. She hopes he’s okay, and seeing him happy is 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 think they’re doing after the finale?
I thought about this for a moment in my mind and wondered if they would have children or not. This is because Mary is not originally a strong motherly person. Once she lets her guard down a bit, she begins to form friendships with the children, but I think it was a big decision for her. You can see that they have a beautiful, fair, and very progressive relationship for the time. They both make decisions equally and prioritize each other’s happiness. And we see that Mary continues to tutor. The last part of the show is when Sarah is really wavered on whether or not she should write the book to Mary. I was like, “Isn’t that too obvious?” She becomes a kind of Jane Austen-like figure who ends up writing for other people. I felt it was so important to me that Mary wanted to pass on what she learned as a young woman, so I think she would want to pass it 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.
