Sense and Sensibility Stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and George MacKay on Finding Their Chemistry
The pair discuss developing their chemistry and adapting Austen.
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Where did young Daisy Edgar-Jones see her future self? Hopefully playing an Austen heroine, the actress admits.
Wish granted, as Edgar-Jones plays Elinor Dashwood, one of Austen’s first literary heroines, in director Georgia Oakley‘s newest feature Sense and Sensibility. To celebrate, Seen on the Screen host Jacqueline Coley travels across the pond to London for a special episode with Edgar-Jones and costar George MacKay to discuss the film.
MacKay, who stars as Elinor’s love interest Edward Ferrars, admits it wasn’t hard to find the chemistry between the two. “I immediately felt really safe with Daisy,” MacKay says. “…It was just such a pleasure to be, like, ‘You want to run lines? Amazing. Can I come to your room?’…There was no sort of embarrassment.”
Edgar-Jones agrees. “I think it’s really fun when you find someone who shares your sort of, I don’t want to say neurosis,” she laughs. “But I feel like we were so well-cast as Edward and Elinor because we both are very similar in the way that we operate… It’s funny because I suppose I feel like Esmé [Creed-Miles, who plays Elinor’s sister Marianne] and Frank [Dillane, who plays one of Marianne’s love interests John Willoughby] had a similar sort of freedom to their process.”
But Edgar-Jones and MacKay aren’t entirely like their characters, and they confess playing emotionally reserved characters led to laughs between the two when the cameras weren’t rolling. “It is quite funny all the things that you wish you could say and all you can’t, so we would sort of fill in the gaps between the takes of what they really wanted to say and all they did. It was really silly and fun,” Edgar-Jones says.
Channeling Austen, who once wrote that letters “express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth,” MacKay recalls production anecdotes of writing letters with Edgar-Jones to learn more about each other. “We have such a short period of time as characters to get to know one another, so few scenes to plant the seeds of that love. But that short time on-screen is actually quite a long couple of months at the house, and so we wanted to fill all of the time that was offscreen with an understanding of each other… They would be nothing salacious, very respectful, but intimate, and I think the intimacy that came with working in kind of the same way was my greatest pleasure.”
Watch the full interview above to hear Edgar-Jones and MacKay talk about which of their past roles most influenced their performances in Sense and Sensibility, discuss bringing new dimensions to iconic characters, and answer trivia about previous Austen adaptations.
Sense and Sensibility opens in theaters October 16. Buy tickets right now on Fandango.
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Seen on the Screen is a Universal Entertainment and Fandango podcast series hosted by Jacqueline Coley, Awards Editor at Rotten Tomatoes.
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