Who is The Other Bennet Sister? Star Ella Bruccoleri reveals all
From the shadows of Pride & Prejudice, Mary Bennet takes centre stage in BBC drama The Other Bennet Sister. DQ speaks to star Ella Bruccoleri about playing the overlooked character, brushing up on Jane Austen and stepping into a leading role for the first time.
Growing up, Ella Bruccoleri didn’t read much Jane Austen. “We were more of a Brontë family,” she jokes. But since landing the lead role in BBC and BritBox period drama The Other Bennet Sister, the actor has been working her way through Austen’s famed back catalogue, not least Pride & Prejudice, the classic novel that inspired the 10-part series.
In fact, The Other Bennet Sister is based on the novel by Janice Hadlow (a former BBC controller), which reimagines the world of Pride & Prejudice through the eyes of Mary Bennet, the often-overlooked middle sister, as she attempts to step out of the shadows and build a life and identity of her own.
The series opens at Longbourn, where the Bennet family’s five unmarried daughters navigate the rigid expectations of Regency society. Mary (Bruccoleri)’s journey sees her leave her family home for the soirées of Regency London and the peaks and vales of the Lake District, all in search of independence, self-love and reinvention.
Bruccoleri stars alongside Richard E Grant and Ruth Jones as Mr and Mrs Bennet, Richard Coyle and Indira Varma as Mr and Mrs Gardiner, and Laurie Davidson and Dónal Finn as Mary’s potential suitors, Mr Ryder and Mr Hayward. The other Bennet sisters comprise Maddie Close (Jane), Poppy Gilbert (Lizzie), Molly Wright (Kitty) and Grace Hogg-Robinson (Lydia).
Sarah Quintrell adapted Hadlow’s novel for the small screen, with additional writing by Maddie Dai. Produced by Bad Wolf, the series is directed by Jennifer Sheridan and Asim Abbasi. Sony Pictures Television is handling international distribution.
Despite bumping into a fellow actor who told her she had auditioned for the lead part “months ago” while Bruccoleri herself was en route to her audition to play Mary, the casting process was swift from Bruccoleri’s point of view. After two meetings in two weeks, the role was hers. “It all happened very quickly, and I’m very grateful. I loved playing it. I just loved the whole thing,” she tells DQ.
The former Call the Midwife star admits she wasn’t familiar with the world of Austen before getting the job. “Obviously, I haven’t been hiding under a rock, so I know of it as a huge institution that people love,” she says. It was only when she was auditioning that she started to brush up on the author’s work and read Pride & Prejudice. After that, “I devoured loads of it. I really, truly became a huge Austen fan, and I’m still reading Austen now, even though I finished making the show. I feel guilty that I didn’t come to her sooner, because she’s just an excellent writer. It’s been a nice welcome to the world of Austen for me.”
With Mary placed at the centre of a familiar story, Bruccoleri says elements of the series are “very faithful” to Pride & Prejudice, which follows the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy. Here, however, “you just see it through Mary’s eyes. All of those iconic characters and scenes are still there. You just see them all from a slightly different perspective, which is really interesting, and then it becomes something else entirely.”
Bruccoleri believes her character is still representative of the one Austen created, but the story explores her role in the family in greater detail as Jones’s Mrs Bennet continually ignores, overlooks and sidelines her in favour of supporting her other daughters’ search for wealth and security – and possibly love – in marriage.
“They’re such an iconic family, but they loom so large for Mary as well. She doesn’t really understand herself outside of her family at all, because it’s all she’s ever known, and what she thinks is her worth as a person comes from Mrs Bennet,” Bruccoleri says. “So it’s a long and hard journey to extricate herself from all of that and understand that she might have some value outside of her family. It’s a tricky journey to go on, but she does get there with the help of other people.”
The title of the show is almost a direct reflection of Mrs Bennet’s view of Mary, whom she doesn’t believe is “marriage material,” Bruccoleri continues. “She has four daughters who all have their charms and their beauty, and then she has Mary and it’s like, ‘Where do you place this girl that you don’t know what to do with?’ Mary just doesn’t know what her function is, so she tries to find a purpose for herself within the family.”
Between episodes one and two, Mary decides to become “the academic one” by leaning into her books. But she is mocked for wearing glasses in order to read, and her family “still don’t notice that or care about that, or think she’s silly,” the actor notes. “So it’s really hard to work out what you’re meant to be and what your purpose is meant to be. It’s only when she literally leaves home that she’s able to have a bit of space and work out, ‘OK, this is who I am.’ She doesn’t really know who she is.”
As practical as Mrs Bennet’s aims to save the family from destitution may be, she says some terribly hurtful things to Mary – but Bruccoleri is willing to give the character the benefit of the doubt. “It’s just different needs in life,” she says. “I think Mary would want someone to just put an arm around her and tell her they love her, but it’s not on Mrs Bennet’s agenda to do that.”
Making The Other Bennet Sister proved to be an intense experience for Bruccoleri, who found herself in almost every scene, on set every day during production on location in Wales. “I definitely hadn’t prepared for it prior to getting the job,” she says, having “loved” playing supporting roles so far in her burgeoning career.
“I’ve never been one of these actors that’s like, ‘One day I want to be the lead in something.’ I actually just find that a really terrifying prospect,” she says. But when she did land the lead role in the series, she understood the importance and “power” of being number one on the call sheet.
“The most important thing when you film something is that you have a nice time filming it, that everyone feels safe and nourished to do their best work and feel happy,” she says. “So we just tried to do that. I was lucky in that the crew and all the actors were genuinely wonderful people. It sounds like such a cliché, but I was working with all these wonderful Welsh people who were just so gorgeous. All the actors were really invested in it.
“It made my job quite easy, but I just tried to do it with kindness and advocate for people if I felt that they were not having a good time or that there was something I needed to say on their behalf. But I enjoyed the experience so much. It made me think, ‘Maybe it’s not so scary. Maybe I can do it again.’ I was blessed with the circumstances and the people.”
To hone her performance as Mary, complete with the tiny mannerisms that greet every Mrs Bennet put-down, Bruccoleri partnered with a movement coach. A lot of that movement related to the social etiquette of the time, which dictated how women should stand or sit. “Mary just finds that really difficult and doesn’t understand how she could move her body in that way,” the actor says. “So we were trying to find ways for Mary to do those movements that she would have been taught as a child, but not quite getting them right. She’s more awkward in her body.
“That was a really nice thing to find when you’re next to these actresses who are playing it with poise and equilibrium. It was nice to find all her squirminess and discomfort, and I had corsets on as well. I wanted to wear the corset every day initially, just to help with some of Mary’s repression. Then as the series went on, I wore it less and less, which was nice for me, because they’re horrible to wear. But also, that helped with finding Mary’s freedom a little bit as she moves through the series.”
Bruccoleri’s prep for the role went beyond etiquette, however. She also had to learn to play the piano for scenes in which Mary does so on screen, while there’s also a moment when the character sings to an assembled audience, even though singing isn’t one of her greatest talents.
That meant the actor, who is the lead singer in Americana band Marry Me Emelie, had to perform “the worst singing of all time.” “But it wasn’t that difficult to do,” she says, “because I was genuinely really nervous. You allow that natural crack to come into your voice, so it was just awful. It was really painful. I had to do it in front of a whole room of people. I genuinely felt really watched in the way that Mary did.”
One of the most enjoyable scenes for Bruccoleri to film was one with Finn, in which Mary and Mr Hayward perform bird noises to each other in a park. “And it was so difficult,” she remembers, “because he’d really perfected some of these bird calls, but he was looking at me dead in the eye, serious, and I was really struggling. You can see me laughing – I just couldn’t do it without laughing.
“And I love the dances. I love dancing. I had a dance scene with Laurie where we were twirling each other around, and we were getting so giddy. We just couldn’t stop laughing all afternoon.”
Is there any hope that Mary finds happiness, and possibly love, by the end of the series? “There definitely is,” Bruccoleri teases. “It’s not a spoiler to say there is romance. There’s potentially more romance than Mary ever bargained for in the latter half of the series.”
But she believes the overriding message of the show isn’t about Mary’s romantic relationships with other people, but about her own relationship with – and acceptance of – herself. “It’s only because she’s able to do that by the end that she’s able to let in another person and accept that another person could potentially love her. So that’s what it’s about. But then it is nice to see her have those awkward flirtations with eligible men in London. Those are brilliant scenes to play.”
After completing filming on The Other Bennet Sister last autumn, Bruccoleri recently acted on stage in London for the first time, taking a role in Miriam Battye’s The Virgins at Soho Theatre. The five-week run concluded earlier this month, and she’s now eyeing her next screen move while also planning more performances with Marry Me Emelie.
In addition, she has a role in crime comedy film Go Away, expected to be released later this year. Until then, she hopes viewers see something of themselves in Mary Bennet when they tune in to The Other Bennet Sister.
“It is maybe a bit cheesy, but I’d love for people to watch it and go, ‘Well, I’m amazing as well, and I’m just as worthy of love as anyone else. If Mary can go on that journey, trying to accept her own authenticity, then so can I.’ That is cheesy, but I just think it’s quite a powerful message,” she says. “I’d love for people to feel that when they watch it.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Miss Austen: In late-life Regency England, Cassandra Austen revisits the homes and memories she shared with her famous sister Jane, confronting old regrets as she decides which of Jane’s letters to burn and which truths to finally preserve.
Pride & Prejudice: Five very different Bennet sisters navigate love, money and reputation in rural Regency England as quiet bookworm Mary, silly Lydia and shy Kitty live forever in the shadows of golden girl Jane and sharp-tongued Lizzy.
Sanditon: A spirited but unconnected young woman arrives in a half-built seaside resort and must decide who she wants to be – observer, moral compass or romantic lead – in a community busy writing its own social fairy tale.
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tagged in: Bad Wolf, BBC, Britbox, Ella Bruccoleri, Janice Hadlow, Pride & Prejudice, Sony Pictures Television, The Other Bennet Sister