![]() “You don’t expect it from Austen, do you?” Samuel recently told GRAZIA. That a lavish, late 18th century costume drama set on the manicured lawns of British country estates could inspire fits of wicked cackling is testament to both Austen and Stillman’s keen wit and enviable tact when it comes to crafting arch observations about the otherwise rarefied niches and unfamiliar dynamics of very high society. The resulting film, also titled Love and Friendship (out now), is nothing short of superb. Twenty-six years later and Samuel was given the chance to learn directly from Stillman himself on the latter’s most recent project, Love and Friendship, an adaptation of two little-known and unfinished epistolary novellas, Love and Friendship and Lady Susan, both of which written by Jane Austen in her twenties and published posthumously. Now 32, the Victorian-born actor, who made his own international debut six years ago in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, still remembers the first time he stumbled across the American auteur’s classic and thought to himself, “‘This looks like quite a smart film, perhaps I’ll learn something.’” When Whit Stillman made his debut in 1990 with Metropolitan, a garrulous social comedy dissecting the manners and the mores of New York’s ‘Urban Haute Bourgeoisie’ during one particularly eventful débutante season, Xavier Samuel was six-years-old. ![]() Kate Beckinsale and Xavier Samuel in Whit Stillman’s adaptation of the Jane Austen novella, Love and Friendship ![]()
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