Netflix To Create New 'Pride And Prejudice' Series With Avowed Feminist Dolly Alderton And LGBTQ+ Activist Euros Lyn
Netflix announced it is making a new Pride and Prejudice adaptation based on Jane Austen’s novels from outspoken feminist Dolly Alderton, who will write the series, and LGBTQ+ activist Euros Lyn, who will direct.
On its Tudum website, Netflix announced, “Best-selling author Dolly Alderton and director Euros Lyn (Heartstopper) are set to bring Pride and Prejudice to the screen once again, in a brand-new six-part limited series. The adaptation will hew closely to the original text, reuniting existing fans with the timeless novel, while also introducing a new generation to Austen.”
The series will star Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy while Olivia Colman will play Mrs. Bennet.
Alderton told Tudum, “Once in a generation, a group of people get to retell this wonderful story and I feel very lucky that I get to be a part of it.”
She added, “Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is the blueprint for romantic comedy — it has been a joy to delve back into its pages to find both familiar and fresh ways of bringing this beloved book to life. 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. With Euros Lyn directing our stellar cast, I am so excited to reintroduce these hilarious and complicated characters to those who count Pride and Prejudice as their favorite book, and those who are yet to meet their Lizzie and Mr. Darcy.”
Alderton is an avowed feminist and made it known in an interview with The Guardian back in 2018. She was asked about the feminist publishing craze at the time and said, “I think it can only be a good thing. I’m not sneery about the commodification of feminism. I wasn’t even that well-read in it but I identified as a feminist from a very young age, inherited from my mother.”
“Until well into my mid-20s it was not a bus that girls I loved wanted to pile in on. It was something embarrassing – isolating and man-hating. I don’t know one woman close to me now who doesn’t call herself a feminist and who doesn’t think about gender equality at home, at work, in their relationship, in dating. That might mean that the complex historic thinking on feminism is, at times, reduced, but I think that’s a small price to pay if something so fundamental to human rights has trickled down,” she added.
Ironically, later in the interview she revealed how her feminist ideology led her to a crisis once she turned 30. She said, “An enormous crisis. I’d love to give a more brooding answer but I don’t want to get old and die. And it’s the female currency of youth. I’ve tried to muffle that noise but some of it seeped in. I didn’t like that I was fearful about potentially losing aesthetic identity, fertility or a certain cachet in romance. It’s so disgusting when I say it, and I actually think acknowledging how gross that was frustrated me. I thought I would be able to bypass that and I didn’t.”
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As for Euros Lyn, he’s made it clear he’s an LGBTQ+ activist while previously working on Netflix’s homoerotic and Heartstopper series. He spoke to Out back in 2023 about LGBTQ+ shows like Heartstopper being gay grooming propaganda and brought up Florida’s bill banning the teaching of gender and sexual identity to children in grades kindergarten through third grade.
He said, “I grew up in the UK in the 1980s when a law was passed, not dissimilar to what's happening in Florida at the moment, where teachers were being prevented and outlawed for 'promoting gay lifestyles.' That's what it was called in the UK. When I was growing up, that was the law, and there's no chance on earth that it made a blind bit of difference to whether I was gay or not. I was the person I was going to become, and what a teacher told me didn't make much difference.”
“But the consequence of it being outlawed was that I was ashamed of who I was, and I was unable to be true to myself,” he stated. “I lived, for many years, wanting to keep being gay a secret, and it made me very unhappy. When I think of these forces who are trying to stop gay people or queer people from expressing who they really are, it makes me so sad, because no good can come of it. People will be damaged. For me, as a gay person, it's very important to stand up for our rights and to push against it.”
He then admitted the show is gay grooming propaganda, “Heartstopper is a story about love. It's a story about falling in love for the first time, and drama can reach out across people's prejudices, across a divide, and allow us to empathize with a scenario that we've never imagined before. An audience, for the brief length of an episode of Heartstopper, can step into Nick and Charlie's shoes and discover what it's like to be them. I really hope that this show can bring some good to the world and that people will suddenly understand, 'Oh, this is what it's like to be trans. This is what it's like to be gay.' I hope it will bring some enlightenment to some of these darker forces that are at work at the moment.”
What do you make of this new Pride and Prejudice adaptation from Netflix and the team making it?
I said, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies would be seen as a masterpiece someday."
And compared to this...
For some reason, I don't believe them when they say they'll tightly adapt the book. With one of them being a LGBT+ pedophilic demon worshipper, I'm sure they'll make the characters gay.
The mentally ill crowd doesn't understand how romance works. They'll ruin it, mark my words.