Pride and Prejudice (2026): Cast, Release Date & Everything We Know

Netflix’s Pride and Prejudice is the largest Austen screen project in twenty years, and it arrives in the year of her 250th birthday. Six episodes, a cast deep enough that Fiona Shaw is playing a supporting part, and a writer better known for a memoir about her twenties than for period drama. Here is everything confirmed so far, and what it suggests about the version we are going to get.

The essentials

Platform	Netflix, worldwide
Format	Limited series, six episodes
Release window	Fall 2026 (no exact date announced)
Writer	Dolly Alderton
Director	Euros Lyn
Producer	Lisa Osborne, for Lookout Point
Filming	UK, from July 2025
Teaser	Released 24 February 2026

Full cast

The cast was announced in waves across 2025, starting with the three leads in April and filling out through the summer.

The Bennets

Actor	Character
Emma Corrin	Elizabeth Bennet
Olivia Colman	Mrs. Bennet
Rufus Sewell	Mr. Bennet
Freya Mavor	Jane Bennet
Hopey Parish	Mary Bennet
Hollie Avery	Catherine “Kitty” Bennet
Rhea Norwood	Lydia Bennet

Netherfield, Rosings and Pemberley

Actor	Character
Jack Lowden	Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy
Daryl McCormack	Mr. Charles Bingley
Siena Kelly	Caroline Bingley
Saffron Coomber	Mrs. Hurst
James Dryden	Mr. Hurst
Fiona Shaw	Lady Catherine de Bourgh
Isabella Sermon	Georgiana Darcy

Meryton and beyond

Actor	Character
Louis Partridge	Mr. George Wickham
Jamie Demetriou	Mr. William Collins
Jasmine Blackborow	Charlotte Lucas
Justin Edwards	Sir William Lucas
Rosie Cavaliero	Lady Lucas
Anjana Vasan	Mrs. Gardiner
Sebastian Armesto	Mr. Gardiner
James Northcote	Colonel Forster
Eloise Webb	Harriet Forster

Two details in that list are worth pausing on. The first is that the Lucases, the Hursts and the Forsters are all cast with named actors — a sign that the six episodes intend to use the novel’s social machinery rather than compressing it into background. The 2005 film gives Charlotte Lucas a handful of scenes; a six-part structure can afford her the full arc, including the Hunsford visit that is the hinge of the whole middle of the book.

The second is Jamie Demetriou as Mr. Collins. Demetriou is a comic writer-performer (Stath Lets Flats) with a very particular register of oblivious self-regard, and casting him rather than a straight character actor is the clearest signal yet of how Alderton reads the novel: as a comedy first.

Release date: what is actually confirmed

Netflix has committed to Fall 2026 and nothing narrower. In practice that means a window between late September and late December 2026. The teaser trailer released on 24 February 2026 carried no date card either.

A rough timeline of the production:

• October 2024 — Dolly Alderton begins developing the adaptation for Netflix.
• April 2025 — Jack Lowden enters negotiations for Darcy; Emma Corrin, Olivia Colman and director Euros Lyn are confirmed the following day.
• July 2025 — Rufus Sewell, Louis Partridge, Jamie Demetriou, Fiona Shaw and Daryl McCormack join. Filming begins in the UK.
• August 2025 — Jasmine Blackborow confirmed as Charlotte Lucas.
• 24 February 2026 — Teaser trailer released.
• Fall 2026 — Premiere.

For a series that started shooting in July 2025, a late-2026 launch implies an unhurried post-production schedule — consistent with a prestige limited series rather than a title being rushed to a date.

Filming locations

Three locations are confirmed:

• Spitalfields, East London. The surviving Georgian streets around Folgate and Elder Street are among the few places in London that can be shot as a period town without heavy digital work.
• The Peak District, Derbyshire. Austen sends Elizabeth into Derbyshire in Volume III, and the county has stood in for Pemberley’s country in adaptation after adaptation — the 2005 film used Chatsworth. Derbyshire is where the novel’s turn happens, so this is the location that matters most.
• Rye, East Sussex, standing in for Meryton. Rye’s cobbled Mermaid Street and intact medieval-to-Georgian townscape make it one of the most-filmed small towns in England.

Read the chapters these places belong to: Meryton and the assembly rooms open the novel in Chapter 3, and Elizabeth’s Derbyshire tour begins at Chapter 42.

The creative team

Dolly Alderton is a memoirist, novelist and advice columnist — Everything I Know About Love, Ghosts, Good Material — whose subject has always been how modern people talk themselves into and out of relationships. On taking the job she called Pride and Prejudice “the blueprint for romantic comedy,” and described the aim as finding both familiar and fresh ways into a book she already knew well. That is a revealing framing. Andrew Davies approached the 1995 series as a social novel with a romance in it; Alderton is approaching it as a romantic comedy with a society around it.

Euros Lyn directs all six episodes. His best-known recent work is Heartstopper — warm, unironic, tuned to the small physical business of attraction — and before that Happy Valley, Broadchurch and a stretch of Doctor Who. He is a director of faces and proximity rather than landscape, which suits a story whose entire plot is people misreading each other in rooms.

Emma Corrin is also an executive producer, their first credit in that role. They are the third consecutive high-profile Elizabeth to come to the part off a defining prestige-television performance, after Jennifer Ehle and Keira Knightley arrived from very different directions.

How it compares to 1995 and 2005

	1995 (BBC)	2005 (film)	2026 (Netflix)
Format	6 × ~55 min	127 min	6 episodes
Elizabeth	Jennifer Ehle	Keira Knightley	Emma Corrin
Darcy	Colin Firth	Matthew Macfadyen	Jack Lowden
Writer	Andrew Davies	Deborah Moggach	Dolly Alderton
Director	Simon Langton	Joe Wright	Euros Lyn
Mrs. Bennet	Alison Steadman	Brenda Blethyn	Olivia Colman
Lady Catherine	Barbara Leigh-Hunt	Judi Dench	Fiona Shaw
Register	Social comedy, faithful	Romantic, painterly	Comic, “progressive”

The 1995 miniseries remains the completeness benchmark: six hours is enough to keep nearly every scene and much of Austen’s actual dialogue. The 2005 film is the emotional and visual benchmark, and it wins on beauty precisely because it is willing to cut — Joe Wright sacrificed plot to atmosphere and got four Oscar nominations for it.

The 2026 series is structurally a rival to 1995 rather than 2005: the same episode count, the same room for Charlotte, the Gardiners and the Lucases to exist as people. Where it should differ is tone. Steadman’s Mrs. Bennet was played as a genuine social liability; Colman is a comic actor with an unusual capacity to make you flinch, and Alderton writes mothers with more sympathy than contempt. Fiona Shaw’s Lady Catherine is likely to be colder and stranger than Judi Dench’s imperious version, which was mostly grandeur.

The largest open question is Darcy. Firth played established authority learning humility; Macfadyen played wounded shyness misread as arrogance. Jack Lowden’s screen persona — the watchful, faintly amused interiority of Slow Horses — suggests a third reading: a Darcy whose rudeness is genuine social incompetence rather than either pride or shyness. If the series commits to that, the first proposal at Chapter 34 will play very differently.

For the full lineage of screen versions, see our guide to Pride and Prejudice on screen.

Reading along with six episodes

Netflix has not published an episode breakdown, but Austen’s novel divides into three volumes and the six-part structure maps onto them cleanly at roughly ten chapters per episode. If you want to read ahead, this is the sensible division:

Block	Chapters	What happens
1	1–11	Netherfield arrives; the assembly; Jane’s illness
2	12–23	Collins proposes; Wickham’s story; Charlotte accepts
3	24–34	Hunsford; Rosings; the first proposal
4	35–42	Darcy’s letter; Elizabeth reconsiders everything
5	43–52	Pemberley; Lydia’s elopement
6	53–61	Bingley returns; Lady Catherine’s visit; the second proposal

The whole novel is free to read here, chapter by chapter. If you have only time for one, read Chapter 35 — Darcy’s letter is the pivot the entire book turns on, and it is the scene every adaptation has to solve differently.

What we still don’t know

• The exact premiere date. Fall 2026 is all Netflix has said.
• Whether episodes drop weekly or all at once. Netflix has used both models for prestige limited series.
• The episode breakdown. No titles or chapter divisions have been published.
• How far “progressive” goes. Development reporting used the word; Netflix’s own language has been “faithful, classic adaptation.” Those are not contradictory — a faithful plot can carry a modern reading of the Bennets’ economics — but the teaser gave no evidence either way.
• A full trailer. The February teaser ran on atmosphere: Elizabeth contemplative, Darcy windswept, a ball, a held look. No dialogue of consequence.

Where it sits in the 2026 Austen wave

This is the largest of a cluster of adaptations converging on Austen’s 250th anniversary year, alongside Sense and Sensibility from Focus Features, a Clueless reboot, and The Other Bennet Sister. Our guide to the 2026 adaptations tracks all of them.

This page is a living tracker — updated on any casting, trailer, or release-date news. Last checked 24 July 2026.