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‘The Other Bennet Sister’ Stars Dive Into the Love Triangle That Has Us All Smitten
The Other Bennet Sister has opened our hearts just like a book of poetry.
Romance is all around us: in the pages of books, in the cinema, and on our TV screens. From the moment Mary Bennet (Ella Bruccoleri) stepped into frame in The Other Bennet Sister, we’ve been rooting for her to find her confidence – love.
Mary prefers facts, and there’s one truth that’s absolute: The Other Bennet Sister is the most romantic show of the year so far.
A spinoff of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the show adapts Janice Hadlow’s novel of the same name. Once her sisters are married off, Mary leaves the countryside for Regency Era London. There, she finds herself not one, but two romantic prospects. She isn’t aware of their interest at first. When you’ve gone so long without being noticed, it’s hard to realize what’s right in front of you, even if they are gentlemen who are absolutely smitten with you.
The Other Bennet Sister tees up a love triangle that isn’t typical for TV, let alone a period drama. On one hand, there’s Mr. Tom Hayward (Dónal Finn), an endearingly awkward, poetry-loving lawyer whom Mary becomes acquainted with first. Then comes along his friend — though rival may be more appropriate at this point — Mr. William Ryder (Laurie Davidson), a free spirit with quite the lust for adventure and an unconventional point of view. While both men’s feelings for Mary grow over time, she is busy stepping out from the shadow that her mother (Ruth Jones) has cast over her all her life.
But Mary finds herself back under it in Episode 6. When she discovers her mother is sick, Mary lands back where she started, but she isn’t the same person her family remembers. It’s a good place, Swooon thinks, to reflect on Mary’s journey so far.
Avery Thompson / Illustration by Rebecca Perlmutter
Over the course of The Other Bennet Sister’s run (it’s already the biggest U.K. drama launch in a year), the BritBox series has kept us spellbound with Mary’s emotional journey. The show’s terrific performances and the irresistible love triangle have made Ella Bruccoleri, Dónal Finn, and Laurie Davidson the perfect first choices for Swooon’s first-ever Sizzle Reel spotlight, our selection of stars who we’ve deemed the best of the best in the world of romance on television.
An Unexpected Proposal
Though Mary is forced back into the company of her family, her story doesn’t come to a standstill. Mary has determined that she isn’t the marrying sort, and when Mr. Ryder crashes the party, she’s convinced that her mother and sisters are wrong about his intentions to propose. Mary thinks Ryder is there about the bell jar she accidentally destroyed, which belonged to Ryder’s late father. It’s painfully clear to everyone besides Mary — viewers included — that the bell jar is the last thing on Ryder’s mind.
“She’s at a point in her life where she struggles to believe anybody is interested in her,” Bruccoleri tells Swooon. “It’s quite tragic, but I think she just finds that concept really hard to get her head around. And he’s a very eligible man, and she’s like, ‘What? I don’t understand why he’d be interested in me romantically, because he has lots of choice out there, you know?’ But also, she’s just got a very firm friendship with him, and they get on as buds, they’re good buds, and she can’t really make that leap in her mind.”
To be fair, Ryder doesn’t get to the point quickly once he arrives. He spends a good amount of time sussing out whether Mary has a similar outlook on life. His views have been shaped largely by his absentee father, who was overly dedicated to his work. By observing his father’s lack of interest in joy, Ryder thinks he has learned the point of human existence: to partake only in things that move or please him.
“I think that Ryder is interested in freeing — certainly freeing himself,” Davidson explains. “He’s already started that process. We hear him say he lives by his sort of mantras of never wanting to really regret not living because of his father and the time he wasted. He’s basically said that he’s going to live every day like it’s his last, and so he sees in Mary someone who is not maybe potentially living up to their full potential and wants to help with that, and through that, they form this connection, and then the love and the infatuation grow, I think, very organically.”
As they spend time together, Ryder asks what makes Mary happy, which no one has ever asked her before. It’s a moment that shows how important this relationship is to her life, even if Mary only thinks of it as a friendship.
“I think he just teaches her to find the joy in life, don’t you think?” Bruccoleri says of how Ryder has helped Mary grow so far. “They meet in this basis where they have an aversion to polite society, like talking about how they think the rules are kind of a bit stagnant and a bit stiff, and they don’t allow you to really be yourself, and they kind of both think it might be interesting to mix it up a little bit.”
“I’ve not seen that kind of development of a romance before, in a period, certainly a period drama, it feels somehow different,” Davidson reflects.
Photographer: Avery Thompson
Shortly before Ryder pops a certain question, he takes a page out of Hayward’s book by reciting a Wordsworth poem that matches Mary’s spirit. He fumbles a little bit in his delivery, unlike Hayward, but Davidson says it’s a reflection of the genuineness of his feelings for Mary. “It’s interesting because there’s so many situations in which Ryder is very comfortable and feels at very ease, and yet I think if he’d sort of pulled this romantic gesture with anyone else, he wouldn’t have found it cost as much,” the actor says. “I think he’s caught out really by how much it means to him, and it’s kind of disarming in that moment.”
The sixth episode concludes with Ryder gearing up to ask Mary a question — but ends before we learn what it is. “Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next,” Mary remarks in her voiceover. At this point, Bruccoleri says Mary’s dreading a proposal from Ryder more than hoping for one. “Only because she doesn’t know at that point how she’s going to react to it, and everyone keeps telling her, especially her mother, that it’s likely to happen, and she just doesn’t want to get her hopes up about anything romantic at that point,” the actress notes. “She just wants to lower her expectations as much as possible.”
Mary struggles enough with accepting Ryder’s compliments, so “the idea of having to sit there and be proposed to just makes her sweat, but that’s not to say that she doesn’t… She has some intrigue as to whether, in the moment, she might say yes or no to it,” Bruccoleri admits.
Mr. Hayward, Where Art Thou?
What Ryder does ask of Mary changes the trajectory of her story. “It kind of forces her to think about what she really wants out of a companion and out of life,” Bruccoleri teases. “And I think it forces her to think about the reality of her situation as a woman in Regency England as well.”
Photographer: Avery Thompson
So, how will Hayward come back into the picture? Until Episode 6 — in which he’s absent — Hayward has been the forefront of Mary’s romantic journey. Well, kind of. Hayward and Mary have formed a friendship as well, but that’s all it can be, since Hayward is courting Miss Baxter (Varada Sethu).
But he stages a poetry reading for Mary, for crying out loud! (And her aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner (Richard Coyle and Indira Varma), but that’s neither here nor there.) Mary, who we know prefers facts to fiction, feels poetry for the first time with him.
Finn previously told Swooon, “I think what’s lovely about that [scene], just after that poetry reading, is I think maybe Hayward’s first time understanding how Mary might be feeling and how she might be investing in their connection. But I think, at that point, maybe Hayward is slightly obliviously building a connection that he understands to be platonic. It’s on this journey of spending time together that he realizes that [he doesn’t] categorize her as a friend.”
Hayward’s feelings for Mary blossom from there, the longer he witnesses her being unapologetically herself. The love triangle is really in full force in Episode 5, when Mary dances with both of her (albeit unknown) suitors. The vibes are drastically different — it’s light-hearted fun with Ryder, but there’s palpable romantic tension with Hayward.
“I think it’s a bit of a turning point for Mr. Hayward,” Finn says. “Because not only is he kind of clocking how he feels about Mary, which is learned through this process of just being friends with her and wanting her to settle into her life in London and understanding that she’s essentially there on her own, and that I think that’s formed a really good friendship. Then they have this dance together in Episode 5, and I think he starts to understand that he feels the same way, maybe as Mary does.”
Finn points out that Hayward still has the societal expectation of a proposal to Miss Baxter weighing on him. “I think meeting Mary brings all that into a new light for Hayward, and so, where has he been? I think he’s been getting his house in order,” he quips.
Will Hayward open the door to a possible future with Mary? Will Ryder get the key to Mary’s heart? No matter what happens in the second half of the season, Mary’s future is looking bright.
