Behind The Scenes With The Cast & Creators Of Sense & Sensibility At Chelsea Arts Festival

On the second day of Chelsea Arts Festival, we welcomed the cast and crew of Sense & Sensibility (2026) to the Cadogan Hall stage. Hosted by film critic and Girls On Film podcast host Anna Smith, the event gave audiences a sneak peek at the new adaptation and behind the scenes tidbits from screenwriter Diana Reid, costume designer Grace Snell, actress Fiona Shaw (Mrs Jennings) and rising star Bodhi Rae Breathnach (Margaret Dashwood).

Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Elinor Dashwood and Esmé Creed-Miles as Marianne Dashwood in SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. (Focus Features)

Writing The Script

Though an established author, this film marks Reid’s first foray into screenplay. She reveals that Sense & Sensibility‘s producer India Flint had read her novels, and it was through their conversations over the course of many years that they landed on this adaptation. Initially hesitant to adapt such a well-loved classic, the ‘threshold question’, she said ‘was whether I had something to say about the book that I felt I hadn’t been said before.’ Thankfully for us, the answer was yes. 

For Reid, that meant positioning the love of the sisters as the pivotal romance of the film. ‘I thought of it as the story arc of a traditional romcom,’ she explained, ‘insofar as the couple is together and then at the three-quarter mark they have a big fight and they’re isolated and then they both go away and reflect and change and they come back together – except in our film, that arc tracks the sisters.’ Subtly tweaking the book to fit this narrative, her goal was to make the sisters’ influence on each other feel ‘symbiotic’. Rather than Elinor’s sense purely bridling Marianne’s sensibility, she wanted us to see Marianne’s sensibility rubbing off on Elinor too. 

Traditionally, the men in Sense & Sensibility aren’t held up as the greatest romantic heroes in the Austen-verse. But here, Reid wanted to ensure the romances with the men ‘felt really intense and also genuinely romantic’ rather than ‘superficial attraction’. ‘I wanted it to feel like these men see these two women for who they really are, and celebrate what makes them unique, such that when they end up together, it’s not just romantic satisfaction. It’s also almost a coming of age moment because it marks their stepping into their full and unfiltered selves.’

Despite receiving the go-ahead to write the film, Reid struggled to convince herself that Working Title would actually make it. ‘They work with so many amazing writers, many of whom are very experienced, and every time I handed in a draft I just assumed that they would hire someone else to fix it.’ Though pessimistic, she explained that it was almost the ‘perfect way’ to create it – free from the pressure of a potential audience and adjudicating Austenites. 

Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Elinor Dashwood and George MacKay as Edward Ferrars in SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. (Focus Features)

Bringing It To Life

Of course, the cast loved it – bringing her script to life in ways she could never have imagined. For Shaw, it was a ‘great privilege’ to be involved with ‘such a piece of architecture of the culture’. An Austen fan, she particularly enjoys the author’s dry wit and her ‘astute, cruel eye’. As for bringing Mrs Jennings to life, she explained that she based the character’s larger than life personality on people she knew from her hometown of Cork. ‘It’s a small society,’ she said, ‘and there are people very like Mrs Jennings in my life. People who are ebullient, subconscious, completely without filter.’

Whilst Shaw is a well-established name, this film also welcomed Hamnet’s rising star Bodhi Rae Breathnach. She shared that ‘one of [her] favourite bits about it was all the animals’, particularly Mrs Jennings’s pug Phyllis. ‘She was very loud. She snored a lot when we were doing all the scenes.’ The other highlight was, of course, her on-screen sisters (Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles) with whom she would draw, sing and play with inbetween takes. 

Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Elinor Dashwood in SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. (Focus Features)

The Costuming

This sisterly bond was further brought to life on-screen through the costuming. One key thing that costume designer Grace Snell hopes audiences will notice when watching the film is the shared clothing. Poorer than they once were, it makes narrative sense for the Dashwood sisters to share, re-wear and adapt each others’ garments – an experience anyone with sisters will know only all too well. ‘I put the emphasis on clothing that would be shared and loved by the sisters and the family,’ she said. ‘So you can see things repeating.’

Taking a more natural approach than your ‘prim and pristine’ period drama, Grace also wanted the clothes to look lived in, naturally dying many of the garments with blackberries and elderflowers. ‘I really wanted to bring our audience into the room with this family rather than seeing it through a telescope,’ she explained.

Where most Austen adaptations are set firmly in the Regency Era (1811–1820), Diana Reid and director Georgia Oakley had decided to set this film slightly early, when Austen was writing her first manuscript in 1797. For the costumes, this meant a more transitory look was adopted, with older characters – like Mrs Jennings – still sporting the fashions of earlier decades. As Grace explained, this ‘Opened up this really exciting period in costume history, where you’ve got the late Georgian fashions and you’ve got the newer Regency fashions coming in. It was a really exciting point and gave me a bit of artistic licence, because it’s quite an ambiguous time period.’

Fiona Shaw was a particularly big fan of her costuming – especially the dress she wears during dinner. Shooting with a lot of candlelight in the film, Grace had to carefully consider how they’d be lit. And so she designed her a mesh metal net overdress to glimmer in the candlelight. ‘That was a spectacular costume,’ affirmed Shaw.

Sense and Sensibility: Cast & Creators in Conversation was held at the 2026 Chelsea Arts Festival. Catch the film in cinemas on 25 September.

Discover the full programme of Chelsea Arts Festival events at chelseaartsfestival.com