Years before “Bridgerton” and the Regency-era fashion moment it helped inspire, director Emma Holly Jones was dreaming of an early 19th century romantic comedy with a diverse cast.
It would take about seven years to get it to the big screen, however. The film, starring Freida Pinto, Sopé Dìrísù, Zawe Ashton and Theo James, arrives in U.S. theaters Friday from Bleecker Street.
Released by Refinery29 in early 2019, the short “Mr. Malcolm's List” was a hit and they were then certain that they had something that people wanted to see. To date, it’s been viewed over 2 million times. Pinto even decided to executive produce the feature. Dìrísù wasn’t a name at the time, but he had that Mr. Darcy quality that she needed. Jones put her foot down even when faced with mounting pressures to cast a more recognizable face.
Zawe Ashton had also always dreamed of playing a character in the novels she grew up loving, by Austen and Dickens and the Brontes. When another actor dropped out weeks before filming, Ashton was approached to play Julia Thistlewaite, the woman Mr. Malcolm's rejects. She had about 24 hours to read the script, make a decision and fly to Ireland to quarantine for two weeks before cameras started to roll, but she was on board.
“It’s breaking open an aspirational genre,” Ashton said. “There is so much historical inaccuracy in every period drama that you see, whether it’s the costumes or the music or the cadence of speaking. We’re not supposed to be watching documentaries. We’re supposed to be reconnecting to a bygone era and understanding our own lives by way of revisiting the past.”
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