Matthew Macfadyen and Keira Knightely in 2005's Pride & Prejudice

It’s now been 20 years since Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen had audiences all over the world swooning in their film Pride & Prejudice.

Directed by Joe Wright, the movie took a more realistic and romantic approach compared to past screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s classic novel, blending traits from the source material with the filmmaker’s more modern approach.

Alongside Keira and Matthew, 2005’s Pride & Prejudice boasts a star-studded cast, including future household names like Rosamund Pike and Carey Mulligan, alongside the likes of acting legends including Tom Hollander, Dame Judi Dench and Donald Sutherland.

But even though many of us will have watched the film countless times over the last two decades, there are still plenty of facts about its production you probably never knew. To commemorate Pride & Prejudice’s 20th anniversary

Director Joe Wright actually had little knowledge of the world of Jane Austen when he signed on to make the film

Joe Wright and Keira Knightley on the set of 2005's Pride & Prejudice

When production company Working Title first pitched television director Joe Wright (who had impressed them with his TV movie Charles II: The Power and the Passion) Pride & Prejudice as his first film, he had never even read Jane Austen’s novel, or seen the 1995 BBC miniseries.

In fact, his only point of reference was the 1940s movie starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson – and he wasn’t a fan of that.

When he was approached about the film, he said that he “scuttled” away to read the Austen classic, which he quickly fell in love with.

“I was reading Charles Bukowski, and so Jane Austen was a kind of shock, really. I was shocked by how modern and how exciting and vital the book seemed,” he told Harper’s Bazaar in a 2025 interview coinciding with the film’s 20th anniversary.

Luckily, having already been won over the book, he also loved the Pride & Prejudice script, which became the 2005 movie.

“I took the script to the pub and by about page 60, I was weeping into my pint of lager,” he told The Harvard Crimson.

The director decided to set his film in a slightly different time to the Pride & Prejudice novel

A behind-the-scenes shot from the set of Pride & Prejudice in 2004

You might not have picked up on the fact that the film isn’t entirely true to the era of the original Austen novel. Pride & Prejudice was first published in 1813, but was actually written even further ago, in 1797. Joe Wright decided to set the film in the year Austen wrote the original draft – and he had a few reasons behind that decision.

Setting the film in the late 1700s allowed the director to explore how the French Revolution had affected British society, and how the Reign of Terror still impacted the era. In that era, many aristocratic Brits had decided to integrate themselves more with the masses, in the hopes of defusing any rebellious sentiment towards them.

“Hence, the Assembly Rooms dances in village halls, which people of Darcy and Bingley’s class would now attend,” the filmmaker said in the lead-up to Pride & Prejudice’s release.

“I felt that the earlier period looked more interesting, it was a more interesting period socially and therefore those social changes were reflected in everything, including costumes,” he added in an interview with Indie London.

The film went through 10 different versions before the crew settled on the version we know and love

According to Joe’s interview with Harper’s Bazaar, screenwriter Deborah Moggach ended up writing around 10 drafts of the script.

In one earlier version, audiences would have followed Lydia and Wickham on their elopement, but budget constraints meant that Joe couldn’t film the couple galavanting on a trip, so he had them romancing inside the existing property instead.

Jena Malone and Rupert Friend as Lydia and Wickham in Pride & Prejudice

“You are kind of trying to shape the script to not only creative necessities but also financial necessities,” he told the outlet.

In the same interview, Joe revealed that there had also been a wedding-party scene for Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, but he felt........

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