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The BBC’s most-watched show since May last year, “The Other Bennet Sister” has also proven to be a sizeable hit on BritBox in the U.S. And the success of the show has taken its star Ella Bruccoleri by surprise, she
tells Variety at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival.
“Everyone connected to it was saying ‘I think this is going to be received really well’ but I always set my bar really low because it depends on timing and all sorts of other factors. So I thought ‘I don’t really mind about the reach of it, I just want people to feel seen by it.'”
Since it aired she’s “been messaged by people of all genders and ages who have just felt like a bit of an outsider, like they’re on the periphery of something they can’t quite access” – just like Mary Bennet in the show, who doesn’t fit in with her family or peers in Regency-era England.
“She looks at her sisters, like Elizabeth who is effortlessly charming people all the time, and Mary finds a basic conversation with someone really difficult,” Bruccoleri says.
“I’ve had people write to me that have difficult relationships with their mothers, as Mary does, and women who feel very scrutinized for the way they look and have felt like that for a very long time. They’ve felt very seen by having someone on their screen who didn’t look like a supermodel as the lead character in a show, which is rarer than it should be.”
Bruccoleri is in Monte-Carlo as “The Other Bennet Sister” is in the fiction programs competition. It has yet to premiere in Europe, but she’s gotten first-hand feedback about its Stateside success. “I find it hard to measure the reach of anything over there because America’s so big, but when I’ve been over to New York and Texas to do press, the journalists have tended to be really fanatical about it. Some of them have even shown me tattoos they’ve gotten of a bird, just like the one Mr Hayward [Dónal Finn] draws very badly in the series.”
Based on the book by Janice Hadlow, “The Other Bennet Sister” retells Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” from the viewpoint of overlooked Mary. Surprisingly, Ella had never read the Austen novel before she landed the part. “It’s mad, isn’t it?’ she laughs. “But I’m from North Yorkshire and I just thought Jane Austen wasn’t a writer for me. She was more for posh southern people. I used to read loads of Brontë because that was the world I was from.”
The actress now realizes she was wrong. “Her social commentary is so good and she speaks so much about class, which of course is universal wherever you live. She skewers people who are obsessed with wealth and materialism, and it actually feels like she’s on my side.”
