A feeling of authenticity was also urgently important when it came to the casting; though Elinor and Marianne both have their suitors (the latter, more than one), Sense and Sensibility is, perhaps more than anything, a story about the love between two dynamically different sisters. So it was a boon that Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles already knew each other a bit, having worked together as teenagers on the 2018 film Pond Life. “Seeing Daisy and Esmé together in the first chemistry read was just such a delight,” Oakley says. “Something about the fact that this wasn’t the first time they had stepped into a room together—I think it really helped.”
S&S_FP_00124_REsmé Creed-Miles stars as Marianne Dashwood and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor Dashwood in SENSE & SENSIBILITY, a Focus Features release.Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES LLCPhoto: Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
Breathnach—who had recently won the part of Susanna, the eldest Shakespeare child in Hamnet—was another exciting discovery; while for Mrs. Dashwood, Oakley was deliberate about bringing in an actor who didn’t appear to be much older than the women playing her daughters. “That felt more historically accurate,” the filmmaker points out, “and there’s a lot of stuff in the book about how Willoughby and all the other men that set foot in the cottage couldn’t help but fall in love with her.” Besides, she adds, “Caitríona has such an amazing, gentle energy that immediately they just became the Dashwood family.”
Ultimately, it’s Oakley’s hope that, between her talented company of performers and Reid’s “propulsive” screenplay, she’s created a Sense and Sensibility that both honors Austen’s rich material and beguiles a new generation, just as other iterations—maybe most notably, Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning adaptation from 1995, starring Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, and Hugh Grant—did in decades past. “One of our actors hadn’t seen the previous film, and he hadn’t read the book, and he asked me whether he should,” Oakley recalls. “I was like, ‘Well, maybe don’t.’ It’s kind of important for some people to come at this without any of those preconceptions. Something I would love is for people who know nothing of the book and who haven’t seen previous versions of it to see this and to connect with it.”
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