Daisy Edgar-Jones just wanted to know who her Marianne was going to be.
After a lifetime of dreaming in Jane Austen — reading every novel and watching every adaptation she could get her hands on — she’d been cast as Elinor, the elder, more sensible Dashwood sister, in “Sense and Sensibility” (in theaters Friday).
If it wasn’t an inevitability that she, as one of the bright young talents of her generation, would eventually get to be in an Austen adaptation, it might seem that way in retrospect. For English actors of a certain age, starring in one is almost a rite of passage. Ang Lee’s 1995 version would earn Kate Winslet her first Oscar nomination and Emma Thompson her first screenwriting win. And this one was going to be special, having the distinction of being the first major “Sense and Sensibility” to be directed by a woman, Georgia Oakley.
And though it was also an inevitability that there would be a slew of handsome men in the mix, including George MacKay, Frank Dillane and Herbert Nordrum (it is the law in Austen adaptation-land, isn’t it?), the relationship between the sisters was, Edgar-Jones said, “kind of everything.” And the search for the more outwardly romantic Dashwood was ongoing.
Casting Marianne Dashwood
“The film, as I saw it, would kind of live or die by the relationship between those two actors,” said Oakley, who studied Austen in school. “It was quite a pressurized situation trying to find sisters that, to me, were believably sisters.”
One of the names in the mix was Esmé Creed-Miles, who might not have come into the audition process with a deep Austen reverence, but who had something even better going for her. She and Edgar-Jones didn’t just know one another: They had spent a formative summer in Yorkshire together as teenagers making an indie film called “Pond Life” and watching “Love Island” together at night.
“So much of sisterhood is a shared history, a shared context, a knowledge of one another and so sort of acting across from Esmé, having such an image of her 17-year-old face, really helped,” Edgar-Jones said. “We just slotted straight into the roles.”
At their chemistry read, everyone in the room could feel an immediate intimacy as they dove into some challenging scenes, like one where the ever-reserved Elinor finally reveals to Marianne that she too is heartbroken over a man. The exercise even helped Edgar-Jones understand her Elinor a little better.
“Daisy feels like family to me,” said Creed-Miles. “We felt so almost spiritually, eerily connected to these women.”
It wasn’t just the dramatic moments that were revealing, either. That day of the chemistry reads, Creed-Miles had a bit of a break while Edgar-Jones read with someone else and, Oakley said, “helped herself to Daisy’s lunch.”
“I can’t really explain it, but it immediately felt very Elinor and Marianne,” Oakley said. “They were both really funny and kind of goofy with each other and, straight off the bat, they were just like making fun of each other and they just had a very sisterly dynamic.”
Creed-Miles, whose parents are actors Samantha Morton and Charlie Creed-Miles, has been acting on and off for most of her life, starting with a role at age 6 playing a Shirley Temple impersonator in a Harmony Korine movie. She also starred in the Amazon Prime series “Hanna” but has kind of resisted committing to being a career actor.
“It’s not that I don’t like acting or don’t want to act or don’t think it’s important and special, it’s just that there’s lots of other things that I’m also really interested in,” Creed-Miles said.
Those other pursuits include photography (her photos from the set were featured in “Vogue”), music (she’s in the alternative rock band Cusk) and filmmaking (she’s directed a short). She was interested in “Sense and Sensibility” partly for the chance to work with an up-and-coming filmmaker like Oakley, as a fan of her debut film “Blue Jean,” about a closeted gym teacher in England in the late 1980s.
“I had always loved this Jane Austen,” Oakley said. “She doesn’t announce that she’s writing a political manifesto, but she at the same time is like unpacking some really kind of knotty and subversive themes in this book.”
Giving the film a messier, more undone aesthetic
To tell this story about a family of four women (Caitríona Balfe plays their mother; Bodhi Rae Breathnach plays the youngest sister) who have suddenly lost their fortune and now have to survive on their own, Oakley leaned into an earthier and slightly more undone aesthetic than is often depicted in Regency-era films. She showed the cast Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights” and Kelly Reichardt’s “Meek’s Cutoff” and made playlists full of violin music. The dresses she referenced had raspberry stains and soil on them.
“I was keen to kind of make a film where the characters didn’t feel at arm’s length. That they felt like human beings that we can kind of reach out and touch through the screen. And so this idea of everything being a little bit more undone kind of came in through that,” Oakley said. “This is actually a family who are going through something difficult and who aren’t constantly thinking about how they’re going to be perceived and how they are presenting themselves because they’re not always in the presence of visitors.”
Edgar-Jones said the prospect was exciting to her as she’d never seen an Austen adaptation done this way before.
“We were not trying to rebel against or go against the grain of Regency-era hair and makeup,” Creed-Miles added. “We were actually finding pockets of nuance to how these women express themselves in their interior lives that hasn’t actually been seen before in film.”
She also found herself developing a deeper relationship with Austen than she’d come in with.
“I think what’s nice about the fact that me and Daisy both had these different relationships to Austen before is that it kind of speaks to, I think, the success of the film and that it really is a movie for everyone, not just Austen fans, but also people that maybe haven’t read her books before,” Creed-Miles said. “It might introduce them and introduce a new generation to her characters.”
