Ella Bruccoleri: 'Other Bennet Sister' takes Mary off the sidelines

NEW YORK, May 6 (UPI) --Call the Midwife and The Strangers star Ella Bruccoleri says The Other Bennet Sister finally empowers Mary Bennet to determine what is best for herself, not just her fortune-seeking family.

"She's on the sidelines of the Pride and Prejudice story, but she's also kind of on the sidelines in her own life," the 35-year-old British actress told UPI about Mary in a recent phone interview.

"She's kind of grown up in the shadow of her sisters and told by her mother that she's innately unlovable, really, and, so, for me, it's a story about her learning to shut out those voices and having to remove herself, quite literally, geographically, move to a different place, so that she can kind of figure out who she is," Bruccoleri said.

"She kind of intellectualizes everything and she sort of shut down a little bit or repressed herself emotionally a little bit over the years just because it would be hard not to if you had that upbringing where you just felt like you were emotionally neglected. So, she's just hardened herself to all of that."

Led by showrunner Sarah Quintrell, the 10-part adaptation of Janice Hadlow's novel follows the oft-overlooked sister of Regency-era heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet from Jane Austen's early 19th-century classic, Pride & Prejudice.

After her father (Richard E. Grant) dies and her mother (Ruth Jones) moves in with Jane, spinster Mary moves from the bucolic countryside to busy London to serve as governess to the three precocious children of the Gardiners, her aunt and uncle (Indira Varma and Richard Coyle), and has the opportunity to re-invent herself.

"She meets these two men, actually, who teach her to trust her feelings a bit more and just trust that she has this depth of emotion and that she can not feel afraid to access it and let it out," Bruccoleri said, referring to Donal Finn's Tom Hayward and Laurie Davidson's William Ryder. "She kind of goes on this journey towards loving herself, I suppose."

Bruccoleri hopes viewers who don't see themselves in the more conventionally desirable Lizzy and Jane will be able to relate to awkward, down-to-Earth Mary.

"The way Sarah always phrases it, is that everyone kind of wants to be a Lizzy," she said.

"You want to have the right thing to say at every possible moment and you want to have that ready charm and wit, but most of us feel like Mary, where you just feel like you don't know what you're doing most of the time and you're just fumbling your way through life."

Quintrell told UPI in a separate Zoom interview that she sees this story as that of a young woman who feels like she's on the outside of a world she can't get in.

"She feels like everything she does is wrong," the writer-producer said.

"Everything she says is wrong. I think it's about feeling like society places standards on her that she can't reach and is telling her what her values should be and they don't align."

Quintrell also was excited to explore what she categorized as "the transformative power of kindness," courtesy of Mrs. Gardiner.

"We don't pay a great deal of respect to young women and this is about what happens when we take someone and we're kind to them," the show-runner said.

"What happens when we're not judging them or telling them how they should live, but we're just kind of shepherding them and buffering them and saying, 'Well, do you think...?' fostering confidence in them, and what a gift that is," she added.

"It's set in a really familiar world and I felt that we could have real fun with it and, so, thematically, I felt like there was tons for me to add and explore. But I love Janice's book and what she'd done and I wanted to retain as much of it as I possibly could."

Finding the ideal actress to play Mary made Quintrell's job easier since the character is in every scene of the show and must convey a wide spectrum of emotions.

"My writing is that mix of humor and drama. Once you've gone down that, you've got to find someone who can play the pain and the laugh-out loud moments and move back and forth between the two at speed turning on a sixpence," Quintrell said.

"It requires real skill and nuance from an actor, so it's not easy to cast," she added. "I was in the room when [Bruccoleri] did her final audition, and she just got it and there, in front of us, was Mary, and we all knew it, and we all felt it. She was so funny and so moving."

The series aired on the BBC in the United Kingdom in March and premieres on BritBox in the United States Wednesday.

2026 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This story was originally published May 6, 2026 at 7:53 AM.