TV & Movies
Matthew Macfadyen Has A Regret About Playing Mr. Darcy In Pride & Prejudice
While fans love his brooding performance, he wishes he’d done one thing differently.
For a generation of viewers, Matthew Macfadyen’s Mr. Darcy is the definition of swoon. Maybe it’s the tension-filled hand flex. Or his sweet, “Yes, I know!” when Lizzy says she’s very fond of walking. Or the scene when he emerges from the morning fog, a man on a mission to tell Lizzy that she’s bewitched him body and soul.
Whatever your pleasure, the 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice brought Jane Austen’s brooding romantic hero to life in a new, exciting way. But playing him was another story, Macfadyen recently told CBS Mornings.
Behind The Swoon
“There were moments I had a good time, but I wish I’d enjoyed it more,” he said while promoting his new film, Deadpool & Wolverine, in an interview published on July 23. “I wish I was less worried about it. Maybe I felt a bit miscast, or I’m not dishy enough.”
But alas, the Succession alum is extremely dishy, which, I’ve learned, is a British way of saying “attractive.”
In fact, Macfadyen is still approached by fans for his performance in the beloved period piece. “The most flattering thing that happens to me now is people say, ‘Were you Mr. Darcy?’ And it’s a good 20 years later,” he said. “So I think I can’t be aging that badly.”
Mr. Darcy, Decades On
This isn’t the first time Macfadyen has reflected on making Pride & Prejudice. In 2022, he told Vanity Fair that the film marked the first time he’d done major press and publicity for a project. “Which I didn’t like and I didn’t understand,” he added.
Macfadyen “didn’t feel very Mr. Darcy-ish,” he told the magazine. However, without knowing it, he did improvise one of the scenes most closely associated with Darcy’s pent-up longing: the hand flex.
ICYMI, early on in the film, Darcy helps Lizzy into her carriage, and after making extended contact with her bare hand, he walks away and stretches his fingers. It’s as if he needs to reset his body after such an electrically charged moment.
In a 2022 interview with NPR, Macfadyen praised director Joe Wright for being “so alive,” and catching the actor do the flex in a rehearsal take. “I remember him just going, Get that. So they just did an extra shot on the hand,” he recalled. And thus, romance history was made.
