Pride And Prejudice On Netflix: Cast, Release Date, Trailer And Everything We Know So Far

It’s been a great year for fans of Jane Austen. First, cosy TV drama The Other Bennet sister delighted us on the BBC, and then came the big-screen adaptation of Sense And Sensibility starring Daisy Edgar-Jones.

Now, Netflix has a treat for audiences looking for something to warm their hearts on a cold winter’s evening.

In December, the streamer is giving fans a new Pride And Prejudice adaptation in the form of a six-part series. With a star-studded cast, an award-winning writer and a director at the helm who definitely knows his way around on-screen romance, we can’t wait to spend some time in Pemberley, yearning over this new spin on Darcy and Lizzy’s romance.

Here’s everything we know about the six-part limited series so far…

Written in 1813, Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice centres on the lives of wealthy people in rural 19th-century England.

The story focuses on Mrs Bennet, who is looking for husbands for her five daughters. Their family home can only be passed on to a male heir, so one of their daughters must marry.

When a rich young man, Mr Bingley, rents the nearby estate, he pursues the eldest Bennet sister, Jane. But the main drama comes when Bingley’s rich-yet-aloof friend, Mr Darcy, rudely snubs Elizabeth Bennet, declaring her “not handsome enough” to interest him.

Pride And Prejudice predominantly follows the misadventures and miscommunication between Elizabeth and Darcy, while also exploring societal pressures and class prejudice, as well as posing questions about love and marriage.

Emma Corrin, who first rose to fame for playing a young Princess Diana in The Crown, will don the bonnet to play Elizabeth Bennet in Netflix’s new take on the Austen classic.

In a September 2026 feature with Vogue, the series’ writer, Dolly Alderton, praised Emma, saying they have “really held up the whole show”.

“[Emma has] been in almost every day of the shoot and they always have so much energy, a smile for everyone; they’re always on their lines,” she told the outlet.

“They’ve never complained, even when they were so cold in the Peak District and had to walk around with a hot water bottle attached to them the next day. They’ve deep-dived into the book and embodied Lizzy so fully.”

Dolly was similarly effusive in an interview with Vanity Fair, claiming: “Emma can balance that very difficult Lizzy combination of emotional depth and vulnerability and wit and sharpness.

“Emma’s a very, very, very intelligent person, and I think that’s what you need for Lizzy.”

Meanwhile, Slow Horses actor Jack Lowden will play Fitzwilliam Darcy, one of English literature’s most iconic characters.

Dolly said she felt confident early on that Jack was the right person to play Mr Darcy, who initially acts cold and snobby towards Elizabeth, until she visits him at his estate, in more comfortable surroundings, when we discover new sides to him.

“You have to see a lot of complexity, which means that when we see the real him – when we visit him in Pemberley and we see his gentleness and his loyalty and his protectiveness and his kindness – he doesn’t suddenly feel like a stranger,” she told the magazine.

Dolly added that, when casting Mr Darcy, “you need a really, really robust actor”, explaining: “You need a really, really muscular actor. That’s what Jack is. And of course, he is also all those things that we need Darcy to be: He’s handsome, he’s sexy, he’s masculine, he’s gallant.

“So it was a no-brainer, really.”

The two leads are joined by an all-star cast of famous faces in the new Pride And Prejudice adaptation.

Emma teams up once more with her The Crown co-star Olivia Colman, who plays the Bennet family’s stern matriarch, with The Diplomat’s Rufus Sewell taking on the role of the sharp, sardonic Mr Bennet.

Sunshine On Leith actor Freya Mavor plays the good-natured Jane, with Heartstopper’s Rhea Norwood as the self-absorbed Lydia. Completing the family will be Hollie Avery and Hopey Paris, set to make their screen debuts as the weak-willed Kitty and the bookish Mary Bennet.

Meanwhile, viewers should get ready to swoon even further as Bad Sisters star Daryl McCormack appears as Darcy’s best friend, Charles Bingley, while Enola Holmes’ Louis Partridge plays the antagonistic George Wickham.

This casting has already sparked debate because the character of Wickham is supposed to be the same age as Darcy, yet Louis is 13 years younger than Jack Lowden.

Conversely, a decision which has delighted Austenheads is that of Jamie Demetriou as everyone’s favourite bumbling clergyman, Mr Collins.

Jurassic World star Isabella Sermon stars as Darcy’s younger sister Georgiana, with Wicked Little Letters’ Anjana Vasan as Mrs Gardiner.

Rounding out the ensemble will be Broadchurch’s Sebastian Armesto as Mr Gardiner, The Power Of Parker’s Rosie Cavaliero as Lady Lucas, The Thick Of It funnyman Justin Edwards as Sir William Lucas and The Last Kingdom’s James Northcote as Colonel Forster, while Fiona Shaw promises to be a scene-stealer as the patroness Lady Catherine.

Although the six-part series doesn’t come out until December, the cast has already started teasing the upcoming show and revealing behind-the-scenes stories.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime role,” Emma told Elle in August. “Pride and Prejudice comes around once a generation, and there hasn’t been a new adaptation since 2005, which is a really long time.

“There are themes in it that will be everlastingly relatable for everyone. It’s a comedy, it’s so fun and so funny. It’s going to be a riot, and I can’t wait to work with Olivia [Colman] and Jack [Lowden]. It’ll be brilliant.”

Jack Lowden has claimed he was apprehensive about taking on such a beloved role, telling GQ in November: “Honestly, the idea of it did make me stop and go, ‘Hold on’. It’s very precious to a lot of people, Jane Austen, so it made me think about it for a bit.”

The Scottish actor, who has long been rumoured to be in the running to play James Bond, ultimately admitted he enjoyed the idea of being an unlikely Darcy.

“When I take jobs, or I’m offered them, I look at what I can get away with,” he said. “I don’t buy myself in 99 percent of the roles I do, but if other people do, I get a kick out of that. I’m not everybody’s first choice for most of the roles I’ve played, and I quite enjoy that.”

“Jack brought the humour to Darcy’s awkwardness, which surprised me,” the writer told GQ. “His confidence and his tenderness are in perfect balance. He can play both heroic and very human.”

Jack is also aware that his version of Darcy is different to previous incarnations of the character.

“I quite like the idea of being a ginger Darcy,” the Scottish actor remarked to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg in April, joking: “I think that that’s really breaking down barriers. One of the great last barriers to be broken down.”

He added that he likes “the idea of me coming along and doing something else with” the character of Darcy.

This new Pride And Prejudice miniseries is being brought to life by novelist and columnist Dolly Alderton.

In 2021, she adapted her own National Book Award-winning book Everything I Know About Love into a BBC miniseries starring Emma Appleton and Bel Powley.

Dolly told Vogue in September that she looked to Emma Thompson – who adapted and starred in the 1995 film version of Austen’s Sense And Sensibility – on how best to approach Austen’s work for a modern audience.

On her approach to the script, Dolly said: “[We must] let the dialogue speak for itself. I must prepare a document of additional dialogue so the language stays precise and the actors don’t ‘Regency ad lib’.”

At the Jane Austen Festival in September in Bath, Dolly opened up more about how she approached bringing the iconic author to life.

“Every time I reread Pride And Prejudice in different stages of womanhood, I have different reads of the female characters, particularly Lizzy and Mrs Bennet,” the screenwriter said, as reported by Tudum.

Dolly revealed that as a “single 35-year-old woman” she was drawn to “how much Lizzy feels like a woman who is thinking out loud, who is trying to work out what she feels about marriage and love”.

“She’s someone who is really torn between her head and her heart – she can be deeply pragmatic in some ways, and then is very romantic and passionate in others,” Dolly added.

Director Euros Lyn will helm the new six-part series.

The upcoming adaptation promises to stay true to Jane Austen’s beloved book – so don’t expect any sudden gunfights or modern dialect from the Netflix miniseries.

Screenwriter Dolly Alderton felt like Pride And Prejudice didn’t need too much of an update as it “is such a timeless story because of the emotions in the book”, which she said “are as pertinent now as they were in 1812”.

“Embarrassment of your family, fear that you’re going to get left behind, fear that the world is not going to be a safe place for your children as it was for you, mortification that you judged someone incorrectly or that you had been misjudged. We go to that book to see our hearts reflected in it,” the writer told Tudum.

Dolly enthused that it had been a “joy” to dive back into Austen’s novel, which she calls the “blueprint for romantic comedy”.

“The book is a gift to adapt – packed with drama and depth as well as comedy and charm. In it lies the opportunity to examine the complexities of love, family, friendship, and society, while aspiring to Austen’s delightfully observational voice,” she told the streamer in October.

The screenwriter – who is a huge fan of the Regency writers herself – hinted that she is including “Easter eggs” for Austen devotees

“There are a few things in the show that I have planted,” she said. “I read everything there is left of Jane’s letters and I tried to include any moments of that into Lizzy’s dialogue that I felt aligned with [the character of Elizabeth Bennet],” the columnist explained, per The Times.

And as for another iconic “wet shirt” moment, Dolly says Colin Firth’s memorable turn as Darcy in 1995’s drama has made her nervous to include the scene in her adaptation.

“I actually had lunch with Andrew Davies a couple of weeks ago, and I was chastising him for writing that scene: ‘It’s never going to get better than that moment with the wet shirt. It kind of ruined it for all future adapters of Pride And Prejudice,’” she told Vanity Fair.

“What we’ve ended up with is something that I personally find very erotic,” she joked.

In past adaptations, Pride And Prejudice has been turned into a Bollywood spectacle, a zombie flick, a Renée Zellweger rom-com, a Keira Knightley period drama and, most memorably, a Colin Firth miniseries.

So, what makes the upcoming Netflix adaptation of Pride And Prejudice different from all the others?

Well, while Dolly Alderton has promised her take is faithful to Jane Austen’s work, fans have already noticed at least one major difference in the first trailer.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” is famously the very first line of Pride And Prejudice. In the book, it’s said by the omniscient narrator, but this new version sees Mrs Bennet utter the words.

“It’s the central drama of her story,” said Dolly, per The Independent, about why she was handing the line to the Bennet matriarch. “It’s all she’s thinking about, it’s a preoccupation that any time a single man comes into her orbit she’s thinking this might be safety for all of my daughters this might be salvation not just for one of them but for all of us so the fact that this is so in her mind all the time felt that it had to be her line.”

“It was most natural for her to take it because it’s all she thinks about,” added Dolly.

Fans are theorising that giving her this romantic quote means the 2026 adaptation will take a slightly softer approach to Mrs Bennet, especially since Brenda Blethyn played her so harshly in 2005.

“Mrs Bennet’s kind of the hero of the whole fucking thing,” Dolly told Vanity Fair. “I really felt I’d like justice for Mrs Bennet.”

Dolly did find unlikely inspiration from a film adaptation of Pride And Prejudice when writing this script.

“The one adaptation that I did reference and I found really useful was Bridget Jones,” she told Vanity Fair.

In the novel, the screenwriter believes “characters were often talking about how charming” Wickham is. But she felt like Austen didn’t spend enough time explaining why Elizabeth was initially drawn to him over Darcy.

“The only examples we really saw of his conversation was him complaining about Darcy, being a bit whingey. I was like, I really need to fool the audience into thinking that he’s the guy that Lizzy should be with.”

The screenwriter was inspired by the way Bridget Jones was lured in by Daniel Cleaver, both of them disliking standoffish Mark Darcy.

“He’s emulated the language of female intimacy to create a false sense of safety in his company. And there was something of Daniel Cleaver’s mischief and playfulness that plays so opposite against what’s perceived as the stiffness of Darcy that I thought was really useful,” she explained to the outlet. As a result, we should probably expect Wickham’s role to expand in this version.

Emma and Jack have both opened up about why think their versions of Elizabeth and Darcy will differ from other portrayals over the years.

“The amazing thing about Jack, and what I think makes our Lizzy and Darcy different, is his funny bones,” Emma told GQ.

Dolly Alderton also praised Jack for his “strong comedy chops,”

“Jack brought the humour to Darcy’s awkwardness, which surprised me,” the writer told GQ. “His confidence and his tenderness are in perfect balance. He can play both heroic and very human.”

Jack himself has hinted that the forthcoming adaptation has a more comedic tone to it than past adaptations – especially thanks to Jamie Demetriou’s performance as the sleazy Mr Collins.

“I think he’s the comic genius of our generation,” Jack gushed to GQ.

Recalling one incident from set, Jack admitted: “I had to turn around and look at him and it was so hard not to laugh. I love a bit of physical business, and he’s still committed to it, which feels like a dying art.”

Yes! Netflix released the first full-length trailer for Pride And Prejudice at the end of October.

The clip opens with Emma Corrin’s Elizabeth Bennet and Freya Mavor’s Jane Bennet lying on a rooftop, talking about their futures.

“One day, Jane, I shall be either a governess and a spinster, or a wife and a mother,” Lizzy predicts in the trailer, tired of the endless chatter about trying to find a husband. “And then finally, we may talk about something else.”

There’s also a glimpse of Jack Lowden’s Mr Darcy skipping rocks on a lake, and Mr Wickham sporting some illustrious sideburns.

All six episodes of Pride And Prejudice will arrive on Netflix on 3 December.