Ella Bruccoleri was looking for the Virgin Mary.<\/p>\n
On a bright April morning, Bruccoleri, an Italian English actress, wandered the streets of Manhattan\u2019s Little Italy neighborhood in search of a votive statue. Though Bruccoleri often plays nuns, she is no longer a practicing Catholic. The statue was intended as a decorative item, an adornment for the London home she had recently bought. She had visions of a bathroom done up in candles and what she called \u201cCatholic kitsch.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI do just love the iconography,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
She rejected one statue as too pink. In another, the baby Jesus pulled focus. A third was too expensive. Finally, she gave up on finding an ideal Mary and settled instead on a red T-shirt adorned with a cartoon of spaghetti.<\/p>\n
On \u201cThe Other Bennet Sister,\u201d which premiered this month on BritBox, Bruccoleri (\u201cCall the Midwife,\u201d \u201cPaddington in Peru\u201d) plays a different, less easily adored Mary: Mary Bennet. A minor character in Jane Austen\u2019s \u201cPride and Prejudice,\u201d Mary is variously described as a pedant, a prig, a show-off, a klutz and a really bad singer. While Austen marries off three of her four sisters, the book leaves Mary loveless.<\/p>\n
By contrast, the 10-episode series, based on Janice Hadlow\u2019s 2020 novel, imagines a future of romance, novelty and self-acceptance for Mary. It is Bruccoleri\u2019s first starring role.<\/p>\n
\u201cGod, I love her so much,\u201d Bruccoleri said of the character. \u201cShe\u2019s not trying to be like other people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bruccoleri, the daughter of an Italian father and an English mother, grew up in the north of England. When she was 4 her family moved to a rural community, and Bruccoleri was enrolled in a drama class to help her to make new friends. After the first day she told her mother that she wanted to be an actor and she has never really wavered, even though she was rejected from drama schools for seven years. (She thinks it may have had something to do with her choice of audition monologue. She played a male pedophile.)<\/p>\n
Eventually, after a year spent working at a family pizzeria in Sicily and two years training at a mime school in Paris, she was accepted into an accelerated acting program. Soon after graduating, she landed a role as a young nun on the beloved BBC drama \u201cCall the Midwife.\u201d The casting didn\u2019t surprise her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have kind of a twee face,\u201d she said. \u201cNuns, maids, that was my thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2022, after four years on the show, she left to pursue other roles, mostly supporting characters. She was asked to audition for \u201cThe Other Bennet Sister\u201d on the same day that she received a request to read for the upcoming Netflix adaptation of \u201cPride and Prejudice,\u201d also for the role of Mary Bennet.<\/p>\n
While Netflix went with another actress for Mary, they asked her to return and read for Charlotte Lucas, another Austen also-ran. But \u201cThe Other Bennet Sister\u201d did want her, which allowed Bruccoleri to use her chops and personal charm to make a case for Mary as ultimately lovable \u2014 a welcome stretch for the actress.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was my first romantic lead,\u201d Bruccoleri said as she glanced into the window of a souvenir shop. \u201cI don\u2019t play romantic leads. People think I don\u2019t have that face or the persona.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jane Tranter, an executive producer on the series, felt that Bruccoleri\u2019s persona and face were just right. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t frightened of showing Mary as someone who\u2019s uncomfortable in her own skin,\u201d Tranter said. \u201cShe didn\u2019t play Mary for likability, and she didn\u2019t play Mary for pity. She played Mary for exactly who Mary was.\u201d<\/p>\n
In person, Bruccoleri is not a pedant or a prig. She has more natural ease and confidence than Mary. But she is drawn to difficult characters (that pedophile) and she knows what it\u2019s like to not fit in. Bruccoleri believes that if she had lived in Regency England, she might have been a lot like her character.<\/p>\n
\u201cMary doesn\u2019t understand the rules of the game,\u201d she said. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t understand how to exist within this period; she doesn\u2019t understand the femininity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bruccoleri had never been much of an Austen fan. (As a Northerner, she is team Bront\u00eb.) But Mary taught her to love Austen, even as Austen has little love for Mary. That day in Little Italy, in tribute, Bruccoleri had accessorized her outfit with a \u201cPride and Prejudice\u201d purse.<\/p>\n
That purse gave her a very English look, but Bruccoleri is also proud of her Italian ancestry. \u201cIt\u2019s been an active effort my entire life to feel more Sicilian,\u201d she said. She had been keen to visit Little Italy owing to an obsession with Italian American culture dating back to her teens. An old online password: \u201cAl Capone.\u201d She admired a moka pot in a Sicilian pattern and peered into Umberto\u2019s Clam House, the site of a notorious mafia killing<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cSo this is where they got out the violin cases,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She was cooler to the touts trying to lure her into restaurants. \u201cThis is very Italian,\u201d she said resignedly. \u201cBordering on harassment.\u201d<\/p>\n