Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles are back together on screen, this time as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Georgia Oakley’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The pairing turns the familiar story toward the sisters at its center, with the film framing them as the heart of the drama rather than the men around them.
Edgar-Jones said she met Creed-Miles on the Yorkshire set of Pond Life in 2017, when she was 19 and Creed-Miles was 17, and the two became fast friends over a summer of filming and watching Love Island. Edgar-Jones said she was “so blown away by her,” adding that Creed-Miles has “this energy that is so compelling” and is “a wonderfully intelligent and sort of wild person, in the best way.” Creed-Miles was equally warm, calling Edgar-Jones “unbelievably kind and talented” and saying she “put me at ease” and felt like “a friend” from the start.
That history matters because Oakley is not making a museum-piece Austen. She described the film as a gorgeous adaptation of Austen’s 1811 debut novel and said she was trying to get at what it might have felt like to live in Devon 200 years ago, while steering away from the idea that everything plays out in a stuffy drawing room. Edgar-Jones said she was glad Oakley’s direction pushed in that way, which fits the film’s more physical, earthy feel.
The result is a version of Sense and Sensibility that treats the sisters as bodies in motion as much as minds under pressure, with undone hair, running, mud and the kind of closeness that can look like affection and dependence at once. The women are described as braiding hair, sharing a bed and absorbing each other’s heartbreaks, which is why the film’s true love story is not the men who orbit them but the bond between the sisters themselves. George MacKay appears as Edward Ferrars and Herbert Nordrum as Colonel Brandon, yet the emotional current runs elsewhere. Edgar-Jones put it plainly: “It’s just a really lovely thing that the love story is the two women and how much they gift each other.”
That gives the film its sharpest point of difference from the version of Austen many viewers expect. In Austen’s world, marriage was survival, but Oakley’s focus shifts the pressure onto the Dashwoods themselves, making their connection the thing the film seems most interested in protecting. Edgar-Jones is 28 now, Creed-Miles is 26, and the reunion gives their old friendship a new purpose inside a story built around sisterhood. What remains to be seen is how fully Oakley’s film will stretch that idea across the whole adaptation, but its center is already clear: the Dashwoods, not the suitors, are the point.
