Esmé Creed-Miles is pacing in a corner of The London West Hollywood hotel lobby, on the phone, holding a banana. Even mid-call and mid-snack, she loo
Esmé Creed-Miles is pacing in a corner of The London West Hollywood hotel lobby, on the phone, holding a banana. Even mid-call and mid-snack, she looks effortlessly sleek: a T-shirt from Anti Public Library (a hip Paris bar-slash-bookshop), jeans, a smattering of jewelry, and a fresh glow on her spotless face. When she hangs up, she joins me in the restaurant and orders a flat white with almond milk. “I’m really jet-lagged. For some reason, I couldn’t sleep last night,” she says.
It could be because the British actor has just flown into town for a couple of days to begin her press tour for a fresh Sense and Sensibility movie. In the 2026 adaptation, she plays Marianne Dashwood, the passionate, impulsive sister who contrasts with her more prudent older sister Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in the Jane Austen classic. By her own account, it’s the biggest thing she has done. “I so wanted it to be the best thing I’d ever done,” she says.
But she nearly lost the part from the start. The first audition, she tells me, was a disaster. “I’m quite a nervous person and actually usually quite shy,” she says. “I find it quite hard to be vulnerable and comfortable in a room full of people I don’t know.” She texted her agent immediately after to say there was no way she’d be getting the role. But surprisingly, the casting director allowed her to give it another shot. “She was like, ‘Yeah, it was kind of awful. She couldn’t remember her lines, but there was a vibe,’” says Creed-Miles now.
After a second audition and a chemistry read with Edgar-Jones, the role was hers. She just had to figure out how to transform into Marianne, a role made iconic by Kate Winslet’s Oscar-nominated performance in Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation. It could have been a vast shadow looming over Creed-Miles, but she’s got a knack for pushing back against that kind of pressure. For one, she still hasn’t seen the 1995 film. “I decided to not watch it because I knew I have a real tendency to compare and despair,” she says.
