Sense and Sensibility Cast Detail the Biggest Changes From Book

The livelier sequence featuring Marianne and Willoughby, she added, “is this kind of real representation of what first love feels like. There’s spinning and lifting and it’s exciting and it’s heady and fun, and there’s so much stomping. It feels so perfect for that that first flush of romance.”

Conversely, the more delicate dance between her character and Edward, which occurs after he reveals his engagement to Lucy Steele is a kind of goodbye.

“There’s all these movements that we have between us where it’s hands that nearly touch but don’t,” the Normal People alum added. “It sort of tells that story of the fact that they could have had a future but might not now. I loved those dynamics. I love those little changes because they really just inject something new into the film.”

An even bigger change was made to the fall from grace of John Willoughby—one that Dillane thinks makes the case that his character is not a true villain, despite leaving a lovelorn Marianne in his wake. 

“We tell a slightly different story in the screenplay from the book, which should be stressed,” Dillane explained. “It is not Brandon’s ward that Willoughby has an affair with, it is it is the widow of Brandon’s brother. And Willoughby is very clear to have not known about what happened in his absence. If he had known, he wouldn’t have behaved in such a way.”

Though he quipped, “You can, of course, take that with a pinch of salt and believe him or not.”

Emphasizing the layers he hopes the audience sees in his Austen bad boy, the Fear the Walking Dead alum told E!, “I tried to play a young man who makes mistakes, someone who loved Marianne deeply. I see Willoughby as a tragic character who definitely could have done better. My role was to betray Marianne, to play the unreliable lover, but I tried to bring as much poetry, exuberance, light, and brightness to the character as possible, and let his actions speak for themselves.”

And though he’d never “rob the audience of their hatred of Willoughby,” he also empathizes with his character’s plight.

“I saw him as a person who wakes up in a car crash,” Dillane added, “and realizes he has to piece his life together as quickly as possible and does the best he can, which is not always good enough.”

This nuance is something Herbert Nordrum (Colonel Brandon) credits director Georgia Oakley with bringing to life.

“I think Georgia Oakley is very focused on making every character as like a whole human,” he said. “With flaws and powers and everything that comes with being a person.”

That portrayal of the whole person, beyond the boxes of sense and sensibility, is especially evident in the characters of Elinor and Marianne.

“I was really struck,” Edgar-Jones continued, “by Georgia Oakley’s vision for this and how she wanted to see a version of the Dashwoods that felt really raw and earthy and quite undone in a really beautiful way, and to really centralize the sisterhood and the love story being between the two women as the kind of main arc of the film. And I feel like she really achieved that.”

After all, it helps having source material that is “so transcendent.” In fact, the more the 28-year-old sees of the world, the more she is convinced of Austen’s timelessness.

“What Austen was writing about was the human experience,” she said. “And therefore every new group of individuals that make that make her books and bring them to life, just the mere kind of individuality of the people making it, but also the context of which it’s being made, will kind of imprint into something different.”

So don’t miss 2026’s Sense and Sensibility, premiering in theaters across the United States Oct 16. For other movies that are sure to earn great esteem this fall, read on.