You’ll Never Guess What the ‘Pride & Prejudice’ Cast Did For Its Most Iconic Scene

In order to get the perfect shot in a movie, that sometimes means waking up at dawn, or worse, before dawn. The cast in the scene, the crew involved to prep, the director, everyone up when the last thing people are thinking of is being conscious. In the 2005 adaptation of the Jane Austen novel, Pride & Prejudice, one of the most iconic scenes was filmed at, you guessed it, the crack of dawn. It’s the scene where Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) confesses his love to Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) as the morning sun rises. Macfadyen’s Darcy utters the swoon-worthy iconic words, “You have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love… I love… I love you.”

Despite the intimacy of the one-on-one scene between Lizzie Bennet and Mr. Darcy, in actuality, in addition to of course, the crew, Knightley and Macfadyen weren’t as long as the scene would suggest. In a recent Variety’s Actors on Actors, Pride and Prejudice co-stars Knightley and Rosamund Pike (Wheel of Time), who played Jane Bennet, shared their memories from the now 20-year-old film, with Pike revealing what the cast did that same morning.

“Remember when you did the dawn scene, where he’s coming across the lawn? We all got up with you!”

Both Knightley and Pike were fairly early in their careers and also young when Pride & Prejudice came out. One of the veterans of the cast was the late Donald Sutherland, who played Elizabeth’s father, Mr. Bennet. During the same interview, Pike and Knightley reflected on working with Sutherland and also shared a heartwarming behind-the-scenes anecdote about Sutherland’s sacrificial nature. Knightley explained:

“There was the party that Donald Sutherland came to. You weren’t allowed to smoke. He had it in his contract that nobody on the set was allowed to smoke anywhere near, and you couldn’t smell of smoke. But of course everyone smoked back then. And everybody would be smoking, and then you’d be sort of spraying yourself. But the party he came to, he came in a gas mask. And he was like, ‘I want you to all be able to smoke. And I wanted to come to the party.'”

Pike echoed Knightley’s fondness, sharing, “he was amazing. He also remembered halfway through shooting that he had a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow that he’d bought while making Don’t Look Now or something and completely forgotten about. [He] remembered it was garaged somewhere up near Manchester and had it delivered to set.” Knightley quipped in reply, saying, “most actors have been a disappointment since then.” Pike concludes, “Donald was pretty legendary. We did have dinners with him sometimes, and he told us some pretty wild stories which cannot be shared.”

You can watch the 2005 Pride and Prejudice on Max. Stay with Collider for the latest updates.