It’s a sweltering summer’s day in the Brecon Beacons, just outside of Swansea, Wales. The rolling hills and sweeping valleys of the Black Mountains swaddle a crystalline lake, where Mary—the oft-overlooked Bennet sister of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—perches on a rowboat. She reclines in a Regency-era empire-waisted cotton dress, parasol up, and…angular orange resin sunglasses. (Are they Jimmy Fairly?)
Vogue is on the set of The Other Bennet Sister, the BBC and BritBox adaptation of the 2020 book of the same name by Janice Hadlow. Based on Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it offers up the tale of the middle Bennet daughter, a young woman on her own search for happiness and a place in the world. In Austen’s original novel, Mary is bookish, awkward, and a little pompous—a foil for her sisters with no neat ending of her own. But across 10 episodes, written by Sarah Quintrell, the series puts Mary—who is played by Ella Bruccoleri, and no less caustic—in the spotlight.
“To be poor and handsome is misfortune enough,” Mary says curtly in the opening episode, “but to be penniless and plain is a hard fate indeed.” As in Austen, there are two options before her: marriage or misery. But when Mary ventures out to become a governess, and then onward to London, she begins creating a life for herself that transcends those ideals—as well as her family’s expectations. A jaunty, heart-on-its-sleeve comedy, the series hopscotches through all of Mary’s calamities and crises, a journey propelled by her elegant aunt and uncle (Indira Varma and Richard Coyle) and love interests Mr. Ryder (Laurie Davidson) and Mr. Hayward (Dónal Finn).
“Mary is a non-typical period drama heroine. There’s more of those women seen at the forefront of shows today, but very rarely in a period drama,” Bruccoleri says later, hiding from the heat in her trailer. (And she would know: her prior credits include parts in Call the Midwife and Bridgerton.) “The women are feminine, ladylike, proper, or a bit coy—Mary is none of that. She has no filter. She’s proud, intelligent, messy. She doesn’t know how to be anything other than that.”
“Sometimes you read a period drama and it can feel a bit stiff—it comes from that repressed feeling at the time,” Bruccoleri goes on. “Ours feels so intimate, so open. I’m not playing a period-drama person—I’m playing a human that just so happens to live in 1814.”
While the first block of filming was all dinner parties and ballroom scenes, much of the second took place around here, with the Welsh countryside standing in for Windermere and Scafell Pike in Cumbria. On the day I visit, Bruccoleri, Davidson, and Finn film a scene that will be familiar to P&P fans: as both suitors vie for her attention (and jibe at each other), they drag Mary’s boat through the water, staggering to shore with white shirts clinging to their torsos, à la Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy.
“My favorite scenes involve the main challenge of…total exhaustion,” says Davidson. In a bid for “visual integrity,” he refused to wear the neoprene underclothes meant to keep him warm in the water—“a massive mistake,” he admits later.
There’s a sense of camaraderie on set. Varma, in costume but on a break, sunbathed on the banks of the lake and hollered encouragingly at Finn and Davidson. Finn and Bruccoleri shared AirPods and playlists (Mitski, Big Thief) to make sure they were entering scenes in the same frame of mind. (After filming, Bruccoleri presented Finn with a Big Thief vinyl and a framed lyric from their song “Mary.”) Show writer Quintrell says the crew booed when Caroline Bingley (Tanya Reynolds) first treated Mary badly.
“I hope the joy comes across. If it’s half of what we experienced making it, that’s more than enough,” Quintrell says. “It’s about what it is to come of age when you’re the odd one out, and the transformative power of kindness.”
“This is my first time doing Austen and Regency,” says director Asim Abbasi, who had just finished working on the second season of BBC thriller The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. “Coming from a conservative society in Pakistan, I’ve found the era’s little moments and nuances of people falling in love—the catch of the eye, the touch of the hand—so refreshing. I like that we’ve been able to keep some reverence, but also bend the rules of the genre a bit.”
Unlike other recent period dramas, The Other Bennet Sister stays largely faithful to the Georgian time period and language—there’s no modern music, or breaking of the fourth wall. “The show isn’t a modern take on the period drama, but it’s keyed up to the current cultural landscape,” explains Davidson, who appeared last year in Robyn Wright’s thriller The Girlfriend. “It takes in that there’s a modern audience who think of dating, relationships, and even monogamy differently. These are high stakes—marriage or ruin—but gently told. I think it’s a beautiful way to tell a coming-of-age story, especially in today’s climate.”
The clothes are a key part of the storytelling. “Our world is very colorful,” says costume designer Siân Jenkins, speaking from a trailer piled high with elaborate period garb, embroidered parasols, and breeches. Mary’s arc is reflected in her shade switch-ups. She begins in grays and muted tones, and then—once in London and blossoming—she opts for bright greens and bold reds.
In an era when women had access to sewing patterns from Paris, there was a lot of room to play. “We could really push for big wardrobes because that was suddenly possible,” says Jenkins. Given the show’s overarching brief was “to bring joy to the Bennets,” each sister has their own color and flower: Jane is pink like a wild rose, Lizzie is cornflower blue, Lydia is lemon like a primrose, Kitty is a girlie lilac.
Shapes stay largely era-appropriate, with bonnets and empire waists, but with contemporary color pairings and fabrics. “It’s so fun to design for a character who no one has really seen before,” adds Jenkins of Mary. “This is a story about being yourself, and sometimes that means wearing lime on lime.” As an Easter egg, Mary’s gray governess uniform references a pinafore the character wore in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries.
Finn—a star of Young Sherlock and the West End production of John Proctor Is the Villain—tends to gravitate toward projects “where there’s a reframing of something that we might already believe that we understand, but on which we can offer a new perspective.” The Other Bennet Sister, for example, represents the strength of a young woman’s voice in a time of cultural change. “I was thinking about being a young person growing up in Ireland, and feeling that there were systems in place that trivialized the way that you feel or didn't give you a platform to discover how to express yourself,” Finn says.
“The show isn’t solely about Mary finding a suitor, or how she will survive in the world if she doesn’t find a man,” Finn continues. “It’s about her journey to flourish in an environment outside of that. It’s about finding someone, then, to love her without apology or quelling her uniqueness.” Mr. Hayward is a quiet, poetry-loving Yorkshireman (the Irish actor keeps the Northern accent on set) who introduces Mary to the lyrical. Finn read Byron and Yeats during filming and beyond—and has been inspired to keep writing poetry.
“For me, it’s been empowering,” adds Bruccoleri. With over two months to prepare—“that’s quite a gift as an actor!”—the Yorkshire-born actor visited filming locations and took piano and calligraphy lessons. It was a mental and physical challenge—especially because she was in the majority of the show’s scenes—but totally worth it. “I don’t need to fit myself into a box that other female actors inhabit,” she reflects. “I have those insecurities, but I feel like…the more that I try to retain my individuality, which is a lesson Mary learns, the better that is for me and people to see.”
Following the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, and forthcoming adaptations of both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, the Regency era still feels ripe for telling universal stories of love and independence. “I want to stay in touch with her authenticity, which can be quite a difficult thing in this industry,” Bruccoleri says. “I’ve been made to feel more certain of what I want to do next. I feel a real sense of integrity going forward to finding roles that light that same fire.”
“She’s the best, most awarded vegan actress in all of Wales today,” Finn jokes when sitting sodden on the shore, gesturing toward Bruccoleri in her boat, grinning behind her sunglasses.
The Other Bennet Sister premieres exclusively on BritBox in the US and Canada on May 6, 2026
