“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 warmth in her trailer. (And she would know: her prior credit embrace components 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 events and ballroom scenes, a lot of the second occurred round right here, with the Welsh countryside standing in for Windermere and Scafell Pike in Cumbria. On the day I go to, Bruccoleri, Davidson, and Finn movie a scene that will likely be acquainted to P&P followers: as each suitors vie for her consideration (and jibe at one another), they drag Mary’s boat by the water, staggering to shore with white shirts clinging to their torsos, à la Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy.
Photo: BBC/Bad Wolf/James Pardon
“My favorite scenes involve the main challenge of…total exhaustion,” says Davidson. In a bid for “visual integrity,” he refused to put on the neoprene undies meant to maintain him heat in the water—“a massive mistake,” he admits later.
There’s a way of camaraderie on set. Varma, in costume however 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 ensure they had been getting into scenes in the identical body of thoughts. (After filming, Bruccoleri offered Finn with a Big Thief vinyl and a framed lyric from their track “Mary.”) Show author Quintrell says the crew booed when Caroline Bingley (Tanya Reynolds) first handled 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.”
