Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden lead the six-part adaptation written by Dolly Alderton, with Olivia Colman as Mrs. Bennet in a cast stacked with Heartstopper and Black Mirror alumni.
Netflix put out the complete trailer for its new Pride and Prejudice on Wednesday, and the streamer has locked in a December 3 drop date for all six episodes. Emma Corrin plays Elizabeth Bennet. Jack Lowden is Mr. Darcy. Between them sits two hundred years of expectation and at least two famous prior versions that people will not stop comparing this one to.
The clip opens quietly, with Corrin's Lizzie and Freya Mavor's Jane Bennet stretched out on a rooftop talking about where their lives are headed. "One day, Jane, I shall be either a governess and a spinster, or a wife and a mother," Lizzie says, per the trailer as reported by Deadline. "And then finally, we may talk about something else." It's a quieter entry point than the ballroom scramble most adaptations open on, and it sets up a version that seems to want to breathe before it swoons.
Olivia Colman gets the novel's most quoted line, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," delivered as Mrs. Bennet in full nervous-energy mode. Rufus Sewell plays her husband, a man the trailer keeps almost entirely silent until Colman's closing jab about why he has to make everything so dramatic.
The rest of the Bennet household rounds out with Rhea Norwood as Lydia, Hopey Parish as Mary and Hollie Avery as Kitty. Jamie Demetriou plays Mr. Collins, Daryl McCormack is Mr. Bingley, Louis Partridge plays Mr. Wickham and Fiona Shaw turns up as Lady Catherine de Bourgh, glimpsed in a carriage dressed head to toe in black.
Shaw isn't the only crossover point this season. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter both note the series was written by Dolly Alderton and directed by Euros Lyn, the team behind Heartstopper, with Corrin also serving as an executive producer in her first credit of that kind. Deadline pointed out that a shot of Lowden's Darcy skipping stones across a lake echoes a near-identical beat from Sense and Sensibility, Focus Features' Austen adaptation that opened in theatres earlier this month, right down to Shaw appearing in both projects.
Alderton told Netflix's Tudum that she nearly turned the job down. "My immediate response was, 'I absolutely cannot do this. This is everyone's favorite book,'" she said, adding that she eventually came around to seeing it as a privilege rather than a trap.
Not everyone watching the trailer is convinced. Reactions pulled by Deadline ranged from calling it a landmark production to flatly refusing to watch another Austen adaptation, with more than one commenter arguing the 1995 BBC version still holds up and didn't need replacing. Whether six episodes change those minds is a question Netflix will have answered by December 3.
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