“It’s funny, a lot of people have been describing Marianne as grungy or dark, but I think they get that from the hair,” Esmé Creed-Miles says. She’s right: It’s a character in itself. In a new big-screen take on Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility, in theaters October 16, Creed-Miles portrays the capricious, romantic middle Dashwood sister, whose mane pours out of her updos and into her eyes when she’s sad and frames her gleeful face when happiness wins out. Even pinned up for a ball, it refuses to stay put.
“There’s this idea that my hair in the film isn’t historically accurate, which isn’t true,” Creed-Miles says. People expect neatly set curls, like those that adorned Kate Winslet’s head in the novel’s 1995 film version. But Creed-Miles reminds viewers that Marianne is younger than they might think. “Before coming of age, young women wore their hair down,” she argues.
Mostly, the locks act as a foil to Daisy Edgar-Jones’s perfectly coiffed ’do, with her curtain bangs and thick waves that behave as obediently as her character. Edgar-Jones plays Elinor, Marianne’s older sister and the sense to her sensibility. Directed by Georgia Oakley, this Sense & Sensibility is the latest in a long line of Austen adaptations. Like the original 1811 work (Austen’s first published novel), it follows the Dashwoods after their father’s death, when they are left at the mercy of their half-brother and his self-interested wife.
There is a marriage plot, yes—actually, multiple, as the two Dashwood sisters meet and fall in various forms of love with a handful of men (including George MacKay as the noble Edward Ferrars, Herbert Nordrum as the discerning Colonel Brandon, and Frank Dillane as the rakish Willoughby). But the true heart of Sense lies in the sisters' relationship, as they support, uplift, and fight for each other.
Creed-Miles, the 26-year-old daughter of British actors Samantha Morton and Charlie Creed-Miles, was born in north London and landed her first acting role at age six, portraying a Shirley Temple impersonator in Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely in 2007. (Morton played her mother, a Marilyn Monroe impersonator, in the film.) After that first gig, Creed-Miles took a ten-year break, attending Bedales, a boarding school in Hampshire, and waiting until she was a teenager to pursue acting in earnest.
“I was looking for a way to support myself, so I was going to castings to see what would happen, and people responded to the way I interpreted things,” Creed-Miles says. She doesn’t describe her early career as a grand ambition so much as a gravitation toward the art form itself. “For me, it’s all about the filmmaker and the story as opposed to the profession of being an actor. I just wanted to be around filmmakers and cameras.”
On her fourth film, a 2018 indie called Pond Life, Creed-Miles met Edgar-Jones, and the two immediately hit it off. In the years since, the pair have remained friends and now, thanks to Sense, have become sisters. “She really is my family,” Creed-Miles says of Edgar-Jones. “We feel like sisters in real life, so we didn’t really have to act it.”
Acting fairy-like and whim-spun, as Marianne does, was harder for Creed-Miles. “I’m quite shy,” she says. While Marianne enjoys bedecking herself in ribbons and flitting to a ball in hopes of seeing her crush, Creed-Miles is the opposite. “I do experience that depth of feeling, but it’s from the comfort of my apartment,” she says. To embody the “draggy campness” of her character, Creed-Miles opted to “stay in character and stay in her energy” on set. The crew began calling her “Ms. Marianne.” She laughs at the memory, adding, “It was tongue-in-cheek, hopefully not pretentious!”
Creed-Miles’s prep for the role feels very Marianne-esque, too. While an Elinor might have pored over the original material and devoured every prior version, Creed-Miles avoided watching the book’s most famous interpretation to date: Ang Lee’s 1995 Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning Sense & Sensibility, starring Emma Thompson and Winslet.
“I went into my very first audition without a ton of Austen reverence in my back pocket, and I think maybe that helped me because I wasn’t leading with an expectation of what I’d seen in other period dramas,” Creed-Miles explains. She did eventually read Sense, as well as Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion (her second favorite), but she says she was more into the Gothics growing up: “I was a Brontë gal.”
In a way, Creed-Miles’s Marianne feels like an Emily Brontë heroine. She’s of the Cathy Earnshaw variety (think Wuthering Heights, minus the wicked undertones)—more wild, headstrong, and fit-prone than an Austen girl. The women in Austen’s books are exceedingly modern in their own ways, but a bit more cunning. They often hide behind society's rules as they wait for the moment to strike. Cathy—and Creed-Miles’s Marianne—say to hell with the rules, to hell with coiled hair, and to hell with demureness.
Creed-Miles herself seems to follow a similar playbook, if more quietly. It would be convenient, then, to call Edgar-Jones a modern portrait of an Austen woman, but Creed-Miles pushes back on that. Yes, Edgar-Jones is a bookworm who can list Austen’s oeuvre in chronological order, according to her co-star. Still, she also has “a lot of passion and ferocity as a performer.”
Talking to Creed-Miles, it’s clear she prefers her work to speak for itself. She’s reluctant to talk about her path into acting or her interpretation of a character, and she often redirects the conversation to her co-stars or Oakley. Like Marianne, Creed-Miles finds her outlets in the arts. When she’s not acting, she is either taking pictures or working on music with the alt-rock band Cusk, which she formed with Evie Hilyer-Ziegler. To learn more, watch her turn in Kristen Stewart’s first directorial feature, The Chronology of Water, or listen to Cusk’s recently released five-song EP.
As for the 1995 film, she’s in no rush. “I think I’ll wait until the movie’s press is over,” she says. Still, she loves that more women are taking part in the retelling of Austen classics. “Thompson wrote the screenplay, and now we have a woman directing this one, so there’s a beautiful conversation happening generationally between these women taking on their own iterations of the material,” Creed-Miles says. Because of that, she hopes fans don’t treat the two films as competition. “I don’t think they have to be compared with each other. It’s just wonderful that we have different interpretations. Austen merits that.”