“He’s a very clever writer and he has a meticulous approach to the way he works. “ doesn’t make films very often so to get a chance to work with him was extraordinary,” Samuel recalls fondly.
Samuel plays Reginald DeCourcy, the charming brother-in-law of her late husband and the chief object of Lady Susan’s cunning advances as she schemes and plots her way toward a secure future wherein she can have her (wedding) cake and eat it too. It’s around Beckinsale’s conniving yet infinitely endearing anti-heroine Lady Susan, a widowed and wily mother angling for a pair of wealthy husbands for herself and her daughter, Frederica Vernon, that Love and Friendship revolves. Love and Friendship is Stillman’s fifth feature in 26 years, and his second co-starring Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale after 1998’s iconic The Last Days of Disco. It’s an intelligent film because of that.”Įmma Greenwell and Xavier Samuel in Love and Friendship The humour comes from the context of the characters being either so manipulative, subversive or naïve. “You expect all this romance and sweeping English countryside but it’s more of a manipulation. “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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