From Deseret News archives:
'Pride' odd for actors
Darcy, Elizabeth and Anna are in a cabin during a thunderstorm, with retro square white plates, skewering meat and veggies to dip into cheese.
Watch closely — they never eat anything. All they do is talk and fondue. That is, they dip but don't eat.
So why all the incessant fonduing, fonduing, fonduing?
By the time the filmmakers shot that scene, the actors had been up and working for 24 hours, with only an occasional nap while the crew set up the next shot. It was 10 a.m. and they were tired, a bit dazed, even a little crazy.
"We had just gone mad by that state," said Orlando Seale, who plays Darcy in the film. "We were just sticking stuff in there, and talking around, talking complete jibberish. We had just gone mad."
For Seale and Kam Heskin, who plays Elizabeth, the five weeks spent in Utah filming "Pride & Prejudice" were a bit different from their usual acting gigs.
Both played Mormon singles caught in the drama of looking for a spouse. Perhaps Mormon Victorian equivalents of singles caught in the drama of looking for a spouse. And neither actor is LDS.
"Coming here, I really didn't know anything about this community," Seale said. "I literally had the wildest misconceptions, and I just didn't know, I didn't know. I was totally open-minded coming, but, you know, there are all these negative stereotypes about this community, that I was very, very happy to find completely not the case."
One thing that did affect him, Seale said, was the set of values people in this community have. The filmmakers of "Pride & Prejudice" saw the same characteristics, and how they fit perfectly with a new version of Jane Austen's classic novel.
They said they found not only the societal values similar but also the pressure on singles to get married. Director Andrew Black adeptly creates a comedic similarity between Victorian courting customs and the LDS dating scene.
"You have to be quite careful where you set it," said Seale, "because most societies no longer share the same social morals as the societies did about which (the novel) was written. I think what's clever about this adaptation is they that found a context which works very well with the original story."
Thus the setting of Utah rather than Manhattan. "This preoccupation with finding the right partner for life, and the rush to get married — it's a very important theme in the novel, and very important, obviously, in this community," Seale said.
