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The star of The Other Bennet Sister talks about confidence, ambition and the reality that there’s a little bit of Mary Bennet in all of us.
WORDS Olive Walton
Interview taken from IMAGINE Magazine Issue Three Pre Order here
Ella Bruccoleri is astute, ambitious and assured – even if that’s not always how she always sees herself. Following the success of the BBC’s The Other Bennet Sister, based on Janice Hadlow’s novel reimagining the life of Jane Austen’s often-overlooked Mary Bennet, Bruccoleri reflects on why the character’s story has resonated so deeply with audiences.
“The minute that I got on set I had all these crew members coming up and saying, “I’m Mary.” People of all genders saying, “That’s me. That story’s about me.” And I realised this isn’t a unique thing, it’s actually incredibly universal and a lot of us feel like we’re the outsider, like we’re on the periphery of something that we can’t quite access properly[…] Everyone wants to think they’re Elizabeth, but in reality most of us are Marys really.”
Speaking to Imagine, the Down Cemetery Road actress discusses immersing herself in the Regency era, her evolving relationship with confidence and ambition and why, amid the noise of fame and industry expectations, she simply wants to make good work.
Olive Walton: After such a busy period of work for you on The Other Bennet Sister, does life feel noticeably different now compared with a couple of years ago?
Ella Bruccoleri: Yes, it definitely does. I’m going in for a lot of meetings at a different point in the process now. I’m meeting [people] for projects that are in development, or I’m meeting people that are like, “Let’s develop something together,” or “Do you have any ideas that you want to talk about?” which I never, ever had before.
I think you have to shout a bit less loud to make people pay attention to you or to get access to certain rooms really, is what it feels like, which is huge. That’s a really nice change. But I think in other ways it’s still the same hustle, it’s like the hustle doesn’t end. You feel like you’ve found a footing, and then you’re like, “Oh, no, this is just the beginning, and I have to then keep on going.” The tricky part is sustaining that, isn’t it? You’re only as good as your last thing, your last project. But I would say those changes feel significant to me.
OW: Plus it opens a whole new door to a whole new room of challenges that maybe you weren’t thinking about before. Before it was like, “I just wanna get the audition.” I suppose the challenge continues.
EB: Yes. You realise that it will probably never end, which is quite an exhausting thought. I think the longer you’ve been doing it the more one of the main goals of a lot of actors is to audition less, right? Because auditioning is such a laborious thing to keep prepping for. I think that I actually really see the benefit of auditioning. I’m an actor who auditions. I’m not an actor who refuses to audition because I think that if I was casting for a project, I’d really want to see what that person brought to it before I just offered them the job. I also want to be able to prove that I can bring something before I’m suddenly in the room doing it and then having to prove it then. But I think the culture of auditioning is quite exhausting for actors because you’re having to sometimes get through five auditions in a week, and you’re having to put a lot of time into prepping each of these things. And then it’s obviously quite a nerve-wracking process to go through, and you can not book any of those things, and you don’t get paid for any of it. So I think actors get quite tired of doing that if you’re not booking jobs.
“I think that I actually really see the benefit of auditioning. I’m an actor who auditions.”
OW: What was your initial reaction to reading the script for The Other Bennet Sister?
EB: It was weird, because I got two Mary Bennet’s during the same week, because I auditioned for Netflix’s Pride and Prejudice as well, which came through first, and I thought “Oh, that looks fun.” It was the Dolly Alderton version which I read and liked. And then the day after, my agent was like, “Another Mary Bennet has come through, but this one is about her,” which I thought was very interesting. It all happened very quickly because I think they had been auditioning for quite a long time, or at least I was led to believe that by someone who told me on the tube when I was going in for my audition who was like, “They’ve been auditioning for that for ages.”
It was two friends of mine who I’d worked with before, John Pocock, who was producing, and Jen Sheridan, who was directing and they’re two of my favourite people so I was just going in to meet them and chat about this new project. And then I got sent all of Sarah’s scripts and had this very organically emotional reaction to them. Then it just all happened really quickly. I didn’t really have time to overthink any aspect of it.
OW: That goes back to what we were talking about earlier in regard to the multiple auditions, with multiple loads of prep. This was one set of prep for two auditions, I suppose, wasn’t it?
EB: Yes, it was. It was very clever and saved me a lot of time. But it’s funny because they’d been written so differently. There’s two different angles with Mary Bennet. I mean, I don’t know how much Dolly Alderton’s script later goes into Mary, whether that is she’s explored in any more depth in that, but Sarah had written a Mary that I felt was really obviously based on Janice Hadlow’s book that was really different to any Mary I’d previously been acquainted with. She was a three-dimensional human being rather than an archetype. So, I just took it at face value. As if I was reading any other human being on the page, I just was reading about a young woman and kind of forgot that it was Mary Bennet of Pride and Prejudice if that makes sense at all.
OW:The Other Bennet Sister has really resonated with audiences. Why do you think people are really resonating with her story particularly in the way that it’s told in this version?
EB: It’s a tricky one to try and view from the outside. I saw someone write something saying that “Mary says to Elizabeth that everything comes easy to her,” and of course it doesn’t. Elizabeth Bennet is still a woman in Regency England and finding life very difficult. She still has a lot of pressure on her to marry to her financial advantage and all of that. But from Mary’s perspective, things seem very effortless and easy for women like Elizabeth Bennet. She’s articulate, she’s witty and charming, and all of that seems on the surface really easy to access. Mary finds just a basic conversation really difficult and feels like her life is an uphill struggle. Looking around her, from her perspective, everyone else is finding it easier than she is. I think that is probably how a lot of us are feeling. You look at your friends and they seem to be fine. I think we’re all faking it all the time so I think a lot of people feel quite seen by Mary in that way. Internally, you’re trying really hard to be seen as not ‘other’ or not ‘the outsider’. I also think that people seem to have found it really refreshing to see someone that doesn’t look like a supermodel on their screen in the lead role, and I didn’t realise the impact of that until the show had come out really – that that’s rarer than it should be. And [Mary] is just quite authentically herself. She’s not prettified or beautified in the show, which I think, again, people feel quite seen by that.
“…people seem to have found it really refreshing to see someone that doesn’t look like a supermodel on their screen in the lead role, and I didn’t realise the impact of that until the show had come out…”
OW: What is the biggest challenge that you found in creating the character without her becoming an archetype?
EB: I guess the biggest challenge could have been in the way it was directed. But because Jennifer Sheridan and Asim Abbasi were such wonderful directors to work with, they were so heavily invested in Mary and in the story. They never tried to reduce it down to anything one-dimensional or tropey. I felt like I was different every day. I was a bit worried about being cohesive, because there’s so many different sides to Mary in this book and it felt like I was playing a different version of her every day. But that felt quite true to me, to how people are in real life. There could have been moments where the direction was a bit like, “Can you do that Mary thing where she screws up her face?” “Do that,” “Make it more Mary,” And it was never that, because Asim and Jennifer just let it be this really fluid, changeable version of Mary, and really believed that all of those sides to her were authentic. Sometimes you work with directors that just find it easier to reduce the characters down so that you have these clear characters that differ from each other. And that makes sense to me, but sometimes you lose the reality of people in that a little bit.
OW: You had to learn quite a few new skills for this, learning the piano and dancing. What was it like diving into the world of the time period of the show, and how did learning these things help you to get into this character?
EB: They really helped because you feel just like less of an imposter. They could easily have just not done that, and they could have said “We’re going to get a hand model to do the piano.” and “We’re going to get a hand model to do the calligraphy.” I don’t know who pushed for [me to do these things]. But it was almost like I went to regency school weeks before filming, where I was like, “I’ve got calligraphy on Monday, and then I’ve got piano on Tuesday.” That was a level of investment in it feeling real that I really appreciated. It meant that I didn’t feel like a fraud. I think there’s so many moments as an actor where you get in your head about feeling like you’re a bit of a fraud and you have moments where you feel like I’m not this person, I’m pretending to be this person. The less that you can feel those things, and you can kind of convince yourself that you are in it, it does really help when you’re filming in the actual stately homes from that era, and you’re actually writing with a quill and playing piano.
