Esmé Creed-Miles on Sense and Sensibility, Bare-Faced Period Style and Modern Girlhood

Esme Creed-Miles wears Fallon Puffer Jacket Après in Glacier Azure and Sweatpants Canada Goose.

For Esmé Creed-Miles, the most telling choice in Georgia Oakley’s new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility may be its approach to a young woman’s face. Oakley asked for no makeup, leaving Creed-Miles without the familiar “no makeup” makeup she’d worn in other films. The decision makes the period setting feel less polished, and it puts Marianne Dashwood’s feelings ahead of the prettiness audiences might expect from a costume drama.

That instinct runs through Creed-Miles’s take on Marianne: the people of Austen’s era should feel recognizable from the inside, even when their clothes and social rules belong to another time. Talking with her friend Cazzie David, the 26-year-old actor reflects on romance, sisterhood, social media, period styling and the discomfort of being seen again after years of choosing quieter work.

Creed-Miles went into filming without watching the 1995 adaptation. She’d missed it before the project came along, then worried that seeing Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson in iconic roles would turn preparation into comparison. She still hasn’t watched it. David, who had recently revisited the film, praised the new version’s romantic pull, recalling how Pride and Prejudice made her believe in soulmates as a teenager. Creed-Miles, a self-described cynic who leans more toward the Brontës, says Oakley kept the love story from becoming too frilly.

Marianne’s feelings, and the phone in your hand

Marianne is a romantic idealist who feels everything at full volume. Creed-Miles doesn’t share all of her character’s illusions, but recognizes the intensity: when she falls in love, she says, it becomes everything to her. That emotional extremity was a point of connection, even though she approached the role instinctively rather than building a highly conscious performance method.

She leaned on Daisy Edgar-Jones, who plays Marianne’s sister Elinor, to keep track of where the characters sat in the story and how each moment fit the larger arc. Their on-screen closeness also prompted a conversation about what makes a sister relationship convincing. David joked that screen sisters often seem to cuddle and get along constantly, while real siblings can spend plenty of time fighting. Creed-Miles has a younger sister; for much of their relationship, one was an adult and the other a child. Now that they’re both grown, they’re best friends.

Creed-Miles hopes her sister would describe her as someone who shows up when people are struggling. The less flattering side, she says, is that she can be “a little histrionic” and take up space other people need. They share clothes, too, though Creed-Miles mostly passes along outfits her sister is happy to receive and she’s happy to clear from her closet.

The film’s romantic waiting has a thoroughly modern echo. David compares Elinor’s anxiety whenever a door opens to the feeling of a phone lighting up while you’re hoping someone will respond. Women in Austen’s world could be left waiting for a letter; today, a message can sit unanswered on a screen. The communication changes, but the suspense of hoping someone will write back hasn’t gone away.

Creed-Miles jokes that Marianne could be queer, and says she’d tell her character to hold on until she meets a woman she loves. The exchange underscores how narrow Marianne’s options may have been in her own time. Still, the emotional mess at the heart of the story travels easily: a young woman falls hard, gets hurt and has to make sense of what happened. Creed-Miles says the filmmakers wanted the Dashwood sisters to feel familiar at their core, rather than modernized by adding conspicuous contemporary behavior.

Polos and Pants Canada Goose.

Period beauty without a perfect finish

The question of what looks “historically accurate” becomes more complicated when the record is mostly formal portraiture. David points to the smooth faces and veneers that can make period characters look as though they belong to the present day. Creed-Miles takes the phrase “Instagram face” as a compliment, while David calls her own look “period-piece face”: a face she believes could suit a historical role without obvious modern cosmetic work. The joke opens onto a real styling tension. Period pieces often draw on current beauty ideals even when their setting predates them.

For this adaptation, the choice was to let Creed-Miles appear without makeup. She admits she initially wanted more, partly because she was used to the carefully understated cosmetics that still read as makeup-free on screen. Having her everyday face shown plainly felt uncomfortable. David connects that pressure to the expectation women face to look finished even when they’re meant to appear natural.

The film’s hair choices also invite debate. Some viewers objected to Marianne wearing her hair down, but Creed-Miles says the cast and director considered how beauty conventions might be challenged in private. A young woman could follow the rules when required and loosen them when she was at home. As Creed-Miles puts it, rebellious girls would have existed then just as they do now. She finds it hard to believe that every teenager obeyed every convention simply because formal portraits preserved a composed image.

That looseness extends to the body and setting. David says the film made her want to run through tall grass in a dress, though she has written about how tick worries have made that familiar screen image feel less common. Creed-Miles remembers being anxious about ticks as a teenager, after hearing about Yolanda Hadid, and says the fear made sitting in grass difficult for her. The exchange is funny, but it also shows how present-day habits and worries can change the way viewers read a period scene.

When David asks what Marianne might want from the present, Creed-Miles picks location sharing. It could help her keep track of people, she suggests. Asked what she would bring back from the past, she immediately revises the answer: perhaps a life without location sharing. The joke suits a conversation about romantic suspense, modern communication and the urge to know where someone is.

David also brings up blood facials, describing the process of placing blood across the face with tiny needles as something that sounds almost antique. Creed-Miles has tried one and calls the image “leech vibes.” Their exchange stays at the level of aesthetic oddity: a contemporary beauty ritual that can seem more old-fashioned than the modern world around it.

Mira Bomber, T-Shirt, and Pants Canada Goose.

Returning to a more visible role

Creed-Miles says she’s confident in the film, though the prospect of a wider audience brings up conflicting feelings. She spent her early twenties recovering from the exposure of Hanna, an action series based on a film by Joe Wright. She says she checked out emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically while making it, and that the reception wasn’t as large as she’d been told to expect. In retrospect, she calls that a gift: at a young age, she might have found a huge, Stranger Things-scale response difficult to handle.

After Hanna, Creed-Miles enjoyed indie projects and the relative comfort of not feeling so exposed. Returning with a period romance she believes in changes that equation. She wants people to see the film, but she’s also aware of how vulnerable it feels to be visible in something that matters to her.

One small adjustment is her Instagram presence. She used to get a rush from posting jokes and calling out people in the media; now she says those posts can remain on Close Friends, but won’t go on her main feed. David says she’ll miss seeing them. The shift captures Creed-Miles’s current balancing act: she’s willing to step forward for the work, while keeping some parts of herself among friends.

For a different kind of perspective on adaptations, Creed-Miles names filmmaker Lynne Ramsay as a favorite, saying she can’t imagine another version matching Ramsay’s way of expressing an idea. David brings up Divergent, while Creed-Miles suggests The Hunger Games and Twilight. David prefers the Twilight films as an experience, and thinks the screen version of Normal People improved on the book. Creed-Miles hasn’t read the novel but loved the show.

Creed-Miles’s favorite Austen book is, with a laugh, Sense or Sensibility. It’s an apt answer for a production that uses period clothes and social customs to frame emotions its lead actor sees as enduring. The look may invite arguments about hair, bare skin and historical detail; the feeling at its center needs no modern translation.

Hair: Bryce Scarlett at The Wall Group.

Makeup: Kate Lee using Chanel Beauty at Forward Artists.

Nails: Yoko Sakakura at A-Frame Agency.

Styling Assistant: Natalia Zamudio.

Production Director: Alexandra Weiss.

Photo Producer: Georgia Ford.

On-set Producer: Lily Hyde.

The post Esmé Creed-Miles and Cazzie David on Girlhood, Ghosting, and Instagram Face appeared first on Interview Magazine.