“Matthew’s a man who is sexy in the mode of Richard Burton, with a bit of Alan Rickman. You need to see that kind of rugged beauty in Darcy, knowing that here was a man who walks across fields, climbs trees, and very much manages his own estate. With Matthew, you can see that etched across his face, yet he’s also got this extraordinary vulnerability. On the page, Darcy reads as being very cold, but Mathew is so vulnerable through his big manliness that he gives Darcy extra qualities.”

(Keira Knightley)

Macfadyen recognizes that wounded pride can both humiliate and spark an attraction: “It is terribly attractive when your pomposity is noticed and then punctured in public. It is infuriating and embarrassing and you hate that person. When Elizabeth humiliates Darcy at the Meryton Ball, he finds it incredibly funny. I mean, he is mortified and hates her but goes home and locks all the doors and laughs hysterically into the pillow. That is why she is so attractive.”

“When he was Darcy and she was Lizzie something happened and they were just perfect together. Keira and Matthew were just wicked together.”

(Joe Wright, Director)

“Darcy pops in and out of the film, so I wasn´t there for the whole time. I just sort of wandered around on set texting my wife, who was six months pregnant.”

(Matthew Macfadyen)

Some of the more modernized lines did not come from her pen. One of those was when Lizzie says to Charlotte, `But he’s ridiculous!´upon discovering their union. “That wasn’t my line,” she informed me in a surprisingly candid response. “I don’t think that worked, really. I also didn’t write the part in Mr. Collins’ sermon, when he says ‘intercourse.’ I believe that was Tom Hollander who did that. I don’t think he should have done it, but I forgive him, because he gave such a good performance.”

(Deborah Moggach, Screenwriter)

“I think, at the beginning, you know it´s that fight within herself of trying to figure out why she likes this person. It´s a relationship full of misunderstandings and pride and prejudice”

(Keira Knightley)

Rosamund Pike says that she did end up enjoying herself at Oxford because, in her final year, she fell in love. ‘It was like that sentence in Brideshead, about a door finally opening and you suddenly see what it’s all about. Oxford became beautiful for me. I have wonderful memories of being there and it seemed to be endlessly summer and it was wonderful to be in love, really…’ Her boyfriend, Simon Woods, went on to become an actor, too, and after they split up was cast alongside her in the film Pride & Prejudice in 2005.

Hands, hands, hands…

The side effects of playing Mr. Darcy.

In an unguarded moment, Macfadyen­ calls it “the curse of Mr Darcy”. He and Colin Firth met for the first time recently and had a good laugh about the syndrome. But it wasn’t so funny right afterwards, when the only scripts coming his way were endless crappy romcoms. Spooks had already given him a sense of what it might feel like to end up stuck in one kind of role. “During those two series, I felt myself getting very sluggish and fed up, doing one character for so long. It felt wrong. After Darcy, I thought, ‘No, I’m going to be fussy.’ So I didn’t do anything for six months, just sat around getting ­fatter and fatter, feeling grumpy, getting on my wife’s nerves, and thinking, ‘Oh no, I’ve missed the boat.’ It might have been different if a well-written romcom had come along, but it didn’t.”

“I just love Brenda (Mrs. Bennet) in this scene, just hating him. `My small rectory abuts her state´. I always think that line is really rude. I don´t know why but it just sounds rude. `A parsonage of no mean size´sounds rude as well. I think Mr. Collins has got a filthy mind. He´s all about sex, Mr. Collins, really. Or, rather, sexual frustration.”

(Joe Wright, Director)

“This moment I thought up while we were travelling up to Derbyshire. With my eyes shut feeling the wind on my face, looking out of a car window. And I like cutting from an extreme close-up, to an extreme wide. Those kind of dramatic cuts.”

(Joe Wright, Director)