I felt that the Dashwoods, Ferrarses, and Edward’s secret fiancee needed to all be treated in one post, so here we are with the rest of this large cast of characters…

-Willoughby: it’s conventional to classify him as a prototype for charming, short-sighted grifter George Wickham of P&P fame. After listening to the book recently, I suspect he’s more of a prototype for Henry Crawford: the charming, self-dramatizing guy who’s often sincere in the moment, but incapable of being sincere in the long run. Willoughby starts by flirting with Marianne and ends by falling genuinely in love with her, but not enough to take a stand and marry a woman with no dowry while disinherited. He is a very attractive, charismatic and cultured guy, who dresses well, and wears Regency clothes well. Greg Wise (1995) was too much of a himbo, and Dominic Cooper (2008), although a perfectly fine actor who had played a convincing womanizer in Captain America, seems to have been directed to play the character in an obviously shady fashion. Willoughby instead should mostly seem like a charming egotist, with the egotism finally overpowering the charm in his last big scene with Elinor during Marianne’s illness. (Unlike in the book, he also spells out at this point that Mrs. Smith told him when he married Miss Grey, that she forgave him because he married a woman of character, and he’s bummed because he could have married Marianne instead to the same effect). Tom Hiddleston would have been a good fit in 2008, but is rather long in the tooth for it now; Timothee Chalamet might work, if he can do British.

-Colonel Brandon: we’re deaging him to about 28-29. I don’t know if there’s anything particularly ludicrous about a man of that age making Colonel in the East Indies in this timeframe, if so, he’s a Major in this version. As best anyone can tell, Austen made him 34-35 to account for the whole story of the two Elizas, and we don’t precisely get that here. Mrs. Jennings gossips loudly enough about his attempted elopement to where he somewhat grudgingly tells the story in front of the ladies: he was very young, in love with his cousin the heiress, whom his father wanted to marry to his older brother the heir to Delaford. They were stopped, the heiress was not strong enough to resist the pressure applied by the father, she married the older brother, and meanwhile Brandon went into the army and fought in India. The heiress and her husband died, having run through all their money, and Brandon inherited the estate. Brandon’s ward Eliza Williams, (whom we only learn about later), is the orphaned child of a deceased officer and friend of Brandon’s, whom he promised to look after when the friend died.

–1995 makes Brandon charismatically mousy and angsty, in rather the way that Edward Ferrars ought to be, 2008 goes for dourly intense but somehow soothing, and the two older miniseries go for blandly decent guy with possible Hidden Depths. My own take is that, although polite and cultured, he has that quiet intensity and seeming distaste for conversation you find in certain combat veterans. It’s worth noting that his library is very up to date in terms of him buying the latest books, although Marianne only tells us this very late in the book, after her tastes have taken a more serious turn; it’s possible he’s not that into romantic poetry. I don’t know if Adam Driver can do British, but if he can, he’d be a much better Brandon than he would be as the Mr. Darcy his groupies (including Kathleen Kennedy) want to see him as. Failing that, we want an actor capable of strength, solidity, and subtle nuance, willing to shadow or observe combat veterans in a sympathetic light. He should have a less handsome face and possibly a less Regency-friendly physique than Willoughby. This is potentially another good role for a muscular, bull-necked man who can’t wear Regency collars effectively.

-Eliza Williams: She should come off as sweet, fairly good-looking, and impulsive, to the extent we see anything of her. Due to the change in her backstory, there’s room for this Eliza Williams to be biracial English and Indian, if you like. It possibly puts an uglier edge on Willoughby bad-mouthing her as stupid/borderline half-witted to Elinor, and with a sufficiently charismatic Willoughby that extra edge of ugliness may be necessary.

Nancy Steele: 2008 nails her pretty well, although the character in the book has a bit more of a malicious streak and a much better eye for the cost of clothes (maybe assisted by the far more clever Lucy?)

Sir John Middleton: This is your stereotypical jolly country squire. He should seem like everyone’s nice but embarrassing uncle. It is really, really important that he come off as likably nosy and not creepy when he starts speculating about people’s love lives. It’s worth noting that he’s only about forty years old – he might even be younger than Mrs. Dashwood, and shouldn’t be cast quite as elderly as some versions have him.

Lady Middleton: You need a nuanced, good-looking actress in her late thirties or older, who can wring some quiet comedy out of an insipidly polite woman obsessed with her boisterous children, who cringes at her husband’s and her mother’s more vulgar moments, is quietly miffed when the Dashwoods snub her children, and debates whether to leave her card with the rich wife of the man her husband is cutting for jilting Marianne. She’s a classical upwardly mobile snob, ashamed of her roots.

Middleton children: there are at least three. William, about Harry Dashwood’s age but taller, John (maybe give him the nickname Jack?) who is older than William and Harry, and Annamaria, a girl of three or so. Their bratty kid hijinks are always interrupting and livening up the rather stiff, grownup gatherings they are brought into. As with their dad, the audience should find them funnier and more endearing than the Dashwoods do, while still understanding why the Dashwoods find them annoying. As with the younger Price children in Mansfield Park, the vibe should be a Britified, costume drama version of the 1990s Dennis the Menace or Home Alone movies. (the Chopin/Sand biopic Impromptu, starring Hugh Grant, uses Sand’s children in kind of a Dennis the Menace way that works for a period setting.)

Mrs. Jennings: She needs to be visibly older than her daughters and sons-in-law, jolly, unsophisticated, and although fat should recognizably be someone who was good-looking in her youth, and kind of has the mannerisms to match. Everyone’s lovable but sometimes embarrassingly ditzy grandma, with moments of shrewdness. 1995 makes her and her younger daughter too grotesque and in your face; she needs to be kind of exhausting but fun.

Charlotte Palmer: younger, prettier, less shrewd edition of her mother. Do NOT make her pant like a [BLEEP]ing lapdog like Ang [BLEEP]ing Lee does in that one [BLEEP]ing scene in the 1995 version.

Mr. Palmer: hard to improve on Hugh Laurie in 1995, but we have to try. He’s haughty and sarcastic in almost the fashion of a Georgette Heyer hero, and like them, he’s genuinely attached to his wife and baby beneath a veil of pretended contempt. Elinor accuses him of “epicureanism” which I take to mean that he is particular about food in rather the style of Dr. Grant from Mansfield Park, so him griping about food could be something going on in the background of some scene or another. He apparently also plays billiards in the morning instead of focusing on work, so you could have a scene at Cleveland before Marianne’s illness becomes serious, where Palmer cajoles Brandon out of writing letters to play billiards with him. Charlotte had a bit of a crush on Brandon at one point, or at least that’s how I interpret her claims that he was interested in her, so it’s possible Palmer is vaguely similar in physique or mannerisms.

Miss Grey/Mrs. Willoughby: Mrs. Smith of Allenham, the relative Willoughby has expectations from, considers Miss Grey to be a woman of character. Lady Middleton is a high stickler, so her willingness to visit Miss Grey after her marriage to Willoughby suggests that Miss Grey is highly respectable in addition to being rich. Our other information about Miss Grey comes from Willoughby, and although it should be taken with a cartload of salt, it paints a picture of a rather interesting character.

–She’s either strongly attracted to him (Elinor’s take) or strongly determined to get out from under her guardians, the Ellisons, or both. She is very jealous regarding her then-fiance, but disguises it under a playful and teasing manner, under cover of which she snags and opens Marianne’s last letter to Willoughby when it is forwarded to him while he is breakfasting with her and the Ellisons. It’s safe to say that she pressures Willoughby to write to Marianne and return his mementoes of her; it’s less clear that she actually dictated or composed Willoughby’s final letter to Marianne, as he claims. (The style of it is not very far removed from his last face-to-face conversation with Marianne.) It’s safe to assume that she’s less pretty, and more glamorously dressed than Marianne, but she should also feel like a strong, willful person, who’s not going to let Willoughby walk all over her. The audience shouldn’t necessarily hate her, but they should feel a bit of schadenfreude once they realize that Willoughby is kind of a weasel and this is the woman he’s tied to. This is a nice “One Scene Wonder” role for some up-and-comer who’s showed promise in the theater but hasn’t gotten her big break yet. There should be fanfic about Miss Grey after this airs, or we haven’t gotten her right.

The servants at Barton Cottage: There are servants everywhere in these books, of course, but these three are important because they’re living in pretty close quarters with their employers, and because of Thomas’s “misunderstanding” about which Mr. Ferrars is married to Lucy Steele. I think there’s an older woman who cooks and does general housekeeping, a youngish maid of all work, and that Thomas himself is a fairly young, mischievous guy, maybe around Elinor’s age.

-Delaford: This is Pemberley writ small; a cozy, well-managed property with a stew-pond for raising fish to eat, and impressive orchards and succession houses. (Stew-ponds were frequently associated with abbeys in the Middle Ages, so you could make a case for Delaford having vaguely medieval architecture and authentic Gothic ruins on site).

-Delaford Parsonage: This is apparently small and out-dated, close to the main house, and in need of improvements. We are most likely to see it either in an epilogue or in an imagine spot from Elinor thinking about Edward’s and Lucy’s life there.

-Barton Park: Sir John Middleton’s house should be an older, kind of rough and tumble place, the home of a sporting gentleman who probably uses antlers in all his interior decoration, and a lazy, insipid woman who lets her bratty kids raise Cain all over the house.

-Allenham: we have a fairly vivid second-hand description of one or two rooms. I feel like we almost need to see them in an imagine spot from Marianne thinking about what it would be like to live there, rather than wander around Allenham looking at furniture in holland covers, the way 2008 does. Perhaps we get kind of a glimpse of the holland covers when Willoughby takes her there, before it turns into an Oz-like fantasy of their life together there.

-Cleveland: the Palmers’ country property has a house that was built in the Georgian/Regency era, built on a sloping lawn with a bunch of trees (fir, mountain ash, acacia). It has a winding shrubbery walk (possibly a maze or quasi maze) with a Grecian temple built on a high point at the far end (or at the center point, if it’s some kind of maze). The “offices” (kitchen, laundry, other utility buildings) are screened from the main house by more trees of the above type plus Lombardy poplars. We see the grounds in a rainy early spring. There’s something of a tendency to make it seem like a cold, grim place, mostly because the darkest event of the book – Marianne’s near death – takes place here, but I think a good production designer and cinematographer could make the glitter of fashionable Regency decorating feel equally oppressive and off-putting, and I feel like Charlotte’s home is much more likely to be glittery and fashionable on the inside than cold and grim.

-Coombe Magna: we only see Willoughby’s country home in the distance, I think when Marianne wanders up to Cleveland’s Grecian temple while staying with the Palmers. From the name and story function, I’m imagining Coombe Magna to be ancient, imposing, and castle-like.

-London residences: we are told the street names for the residences of nearly everyone in London the Dashwoods are acquainted with. Willoughby’s residence in the hyper-fashionable Bond Street is the only one that jumps to mind. With a good period researcher it should be possible to work out what nearly every place the Dashwoods visit in London looks like, and dress sets and choose shooting locations (or cgi exteriors) accordingly.

Next time: plot we’ve got, quite a lot…