So, a picture of the Bennet women from this adaptation dropped, along with a more complete cast list (not always with character names attached).

In the picture, Emma Corrin gives Elizabeth Garvie (Lizzie from P&P 1980) vibes and I don’t mind. Meanwhile, the women portraying Jane and Lydia Bennet seem to fit their roles. A singer/musician with red hair (unfashionable in the Georgian/Regency timeframe) has been cast as plain musician Mary Bennet. A tall, stocky theater actress, styled to look heavier than she actually is, has been cast as Kitty Bennet (described in the book as slight, delicate, and prone to coughing). The facial expression caught on Kitty Bennet in this still is also…unflattering. I have my suspicions about what they’re doing with this character, but it’s an ugly enough idea that I’m not going to put it out there, in case I’m being unjust to the people behind this project. Production design is so far not exciting: competent 1810s-ish clothes(1) with some attempt to give each Bennet lady her own distinctive style, combined with boring gray-toned lighting. Not bad, but Emma 2020 set the bar awfully high for Jane Austen production design.

Moving onto the three key supporting male roles of Mr. Bennet, George Wickham and Charles Bingley, I begin to understand better why they cast Jack Lowden (basically a boyish Audie Murphy type plus extra height and minus the PTSD eyes) as Darcy. Lowden’s Darcy is probably meant to contrast with the saturnine, brunette Rufus Sewell, who is playing Mr. Bennet. Mostly, I’m pleased they found a suitably handsome fifty-something Mr. Bennet to complement Olivia Colman’s handsome, fifty-something Mrs. Bennet. Should work fine.

Daryl McCormack as a biracial Charles Bingley? Since at least one side of the family comes from the merchant class, it’s not a completely crazy idea, or at least not as crazy as giving haughty, pedigreed Sir Walter Elliott a Malaysian cousin in Persuasion 2022. I don’t remember Daryl McCormack’s character from Wheel of Time at all (was he one of the Tinkers?) but the pictures I’ve seen do give Charles Bingley vibes, and it’s nice that the producers managed to find a Bingley milder and softer-looking than their Darcy, which must have taken some doing.

22-year-old Louis Partridge is playing Wickham. A suitably pretty man, with very chiseled features and eyebrows so sinister they probably qualify as spoiler alerts. It’s rare for an adaptation to pick up on the fact that Wickham is implied to be superficially more attractive than Darcy(2), so points for that.

There’s some debate about exactly how old Wickham is in the book. If he’s telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the Klympton parish coming available two years ago exactly as he was the right age to take it up (age 24 being the earliest a clergyman could be given a living), then he’s 26. But Wickham being Wickham, that’s an incredibly huge IF, and he seems like exactly the kind of guy who’d try to shave several years off his age. The initial description of him when first seen in Meryton says basically “good-looking guy in his early thirties” and I prefer to go with that.(3) Either way, Partridge is a little young for the part, especially since most of the rest of the cast skew older than their book characters.

Fiona Shaw (Sophie Croft from Persuasion 1995) is trying to corner the market in Comedic Mature Austen Ladies, playing Lady Catherine in this and Mrs. Jennings in S&S 2026. It’s very obliging of Netflix to cast a high-cheekboned, aristocratic looking Star Wars: Andor veteran as Lady Catherine a month or so after I described the equivalent character in my space regency as looking that way. Our other Star Wars veteran is Sebastian Armesto, who played Force Choke Victim Lt. Mitaka in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He is generally assumed to be playing Mr. Gardiner, with Anjana Vasan as his wife. Apparently they’re overlooking, as The Other Bennet Sister producers did and I initially did, the references to Mrs. Gardiner growing up in rustic Lambton, which doesn’t sound like the kind of place which would have a significant South Asian presence in the Georgian/Regency era.

Verdict so far? I’m slightly less “meh” on this project than when I first heard of it, mostly thanks to Sewell and Armesto and the obvious attempts to make the whole thing seem more historically plausible(4) than Persuasion 2022. But my response is still “meh.” More curious about S&S 2026, frankly.

(1) They don’t really have much choice when it comes to doing an 1810s setting. If they followed the book’s implied setting of the early 1790s, people will accuse them of ripping off P&P 2005. Plus, audiences are more used to the later style of high-waisted dresses in Austen adaptations.

(2) The 1957 Italian version managed this, and it’s possibly the lost BBC adaptations before and after it did as well. I don’t have any clear mental image of Colin Jeavons, the 1958 Wickham, but Alan Badel, the 1958 Darcy, was not much of a looker to my mind. Meanwhile, Richard Johnson (1952 Wickham) was definitely more of a leading-man “type” than Peter Cushing (1952 Darcy), even if I personally would rather look at the latter than the former.

(3) Granted, Wickham’s led a pretty dissipated lifestyle and I guess you could argue that it’s not the years, it’s the mileage that makes him look thirty-something. Whatever. Stating that he’s 26 requires you to believe something Wickham says about himself, which is generally not the way to bet.

(4) Seen in the costumes and the casting director’s attempts to figure out what social strata from the period might conceivably include people with non-European ancestry, instead of going full Bridgerton with either the clothing or the casting.