Sophie Winkleman & Liam Garrigan: Sanditon’s Star Matchmakers
Sanditon viewers know how enchanting Samuel Colbourne and Lady Susan de Clemente are on screen, but might be surprised to find that the actors who play them are no less delightful in real life. From Bristol to ’80s power ballads, from matchmaking to Happy Ever After, our interview with Sophie Winkleman and Liam Garrigan proves that the joys of making Sanditon are commensurate to the joys of watching it!
What were your favorite parts about filming Sanditon Season 3?
Sophie Winkleman: It was really nice to reunite with Rose [Williams, Charlotte Heywood] for me because I definitely fell in love with her when I met her [in Season 1]. And I thought she was the most incredible little superstar. So I was very happy to be back with her, and I was happy to meet my very handsome boyfriend. We are good friends now, which is so delightful. And it’s quite a luxury, saying such brilliant writing; it’s a privilege for an actor when you get scripts that do all the work for you and you just say them and they come out beautifully. That’s Justin [Young]’s writing. I think we all felt that Belinda [Campbell] is a delightful producer, and we loved the directors. We were in very safe, fun hands. The sets are stunning, and the whole thing was just a big old privilege. And when you have actor friends who are so talented who aren’t getting work, I just always feel incredibly lucky. So yeah, I loved being with Rose again, I love Liam—obviously—and I think we all felt very excited and joyful about all of it. What do you think, Liam?
Liam Garrigan: Well, they shot Season 2 and 3 back-to-back, and I was the new kid on the block in Season 3, so I came in with all of this enthusiasm and energy and things like that, and definitely got the sense that people were coming off the back of a long and arduous Season 2, and it was taking a bit to kind of get the gears back in motion. But then it really came alive. All the things that I was fortunate enough to be involved in were so much fun, so much joy. We had a mad, mad couple of days on Brean beach—which is possibly the windiest place I’ve ever been in my life—riding a horse and carriage up and down the beach, the drag race, which was hilarious. And it’s not very often that you can come away from a job saying that you’ve made some friends for life. I can definitely, definitely say that about this job. It was brilliant. Lovely.
Did you have a favorite costume, and if you could have taken it home with you, what would it have been?
Sophie Winkleman: The light gray velvet fur-lined coat. It was so beautiful. Thank you so much, Lauren [Miller, costume designer]. My God, she looked after me. Beautiful, beautiful clothes. And the men looked so dashing in that time, as well. He looked gorgeous.
Liam Garrigan: Nobody dresses like that these days. Do you know what I mean? I mean, look at me, it looks like just fell out bed into something. So the costumes were amazing. I had a kind of gray sparkly waist coat. That was money. It looked amazing. I would’ve snaffled that if I could.
Sophie Winkleman: It all helps with our acting, though—the beautiful costumes, the beautiful sets. Having costumes like that, it makes you stand properly and move properly. Combined with the writing, it’s just a free passport into another century and another way of behavior.
Liam Garrigan: And the Sandton set itself—it was so beautiful, the promenade and the two streets and all of that. It’s literally 20 minutes up the road from my house, and the first time I pulled into it to do a costume fitting, my jaw hit the floor. I’d never seen a set like it like it.
Sophie Winkleman: It was so stunningly beautiful, I agree. We were all really lucky, with the people around us. We all felt that.
Speaking of the pleasures of making Sanditon, we’ve heard that Ben Lloyd-Hughes is one to break into song—did you ever encounter that, or even try to trigger him into singing a song?
Liam Garrigan: [Laughs] You didn’t have to trigger Ben to break into song. Ben would pull out a pop song or a musical theater tune for almost every scenario you encountered on set. And he would throw some of the moves in. Yeah, we couldn’t stop him.
Sophie Winkleman: That’s true. He was quite fond of an ’80s power ballad, if I remember correctly. And he would take mild offense if the rest of us didn’t join in, which was very funny as well because he often did it very, very early in the morning. Something that there would definitely be a chorus to, and everyone would just sort of look at their phones…And he’d be like, “Come on!”
Liam Garrigan: Yeah, the aim of the game for him was to have everyone join in.
Sophie Winkleman: He’s very funny.
What do you miss the most about Sanditon?
Sophie Winkleman: It sounds very naff to say “the people,” but it really was a lovely group, especially my lovely boyfriend and Rose. I was very close to both of them. Emma Fielding [Lady Montague] was a joy, just a heavenly person—we all loved her. It was brilliant writing and it’s a beautiful place. I personally loved having my own little flat in Bristol—I’m not going to lie, having my own silent, clean, glorious space—I felt blessed and holy. It was amazing holiday. I pretended it was very hard work to my home people, but it was heaven. So I miss every single thing about it.
Liam Garrigan: Agreed, ditto. It can sound trite, but really the people. And I absolutely loved playing Samuel. I had so much fun, and our storyline together was great. It was very, very easy to just throw yourself 100% into it. It was one of the most joyous experiences to have happened on a set. And you really felt like everybody at Sandton just gave the reins to you when you were on set, that’s how it felt for me, anyway. I could turn up and just sort of do what I wanted to do with the character, and nobody was sort of telling me off for it. [Laughs]. It was great.
How fun was it to be Sanditon‘s all-time greatest matchmakers? Have you ever done any matchmaking in real life?
Liam Garrigan: No, I haven’t ever done any matchmaking in real life, I don’t think. I’ve always been sort of the last one to the party. All my mates had all kind of coupled up by the time I got ’round to that—probably a lot like Samuel in some ways [Laughs]. But in terms of Samuel and Lady Susan, what’s better than getting to turn up and stir the pots and make sure that you were affecting all these people’s love lives? It was awesome fun and I had an absolute whale of a time.
Sophie Winkleman: It’s also good because they both put protective casings around themselves because it feels like they, or at least she, have been slightly burned in the past. So they can have fun and feel quite safe, because they’re just not going to let themselves get affected by this silly love business. Absolutely not. And then it’s very funny seeing it happen to them.
I’ve match made quite successfully, always with older women and younger guys. For some reason, that is my sweet spot, and it’s always worked. It’s really interesting. I think a lot of the boys I know slightly want someone to look after them, and the girls I know have been with macho guys and are very fed up with that, and quite want someone to sort of tell what to do. And it’s always worked! So I’m quite good at it.
As we near the end of the series and hope all ends well, we are wondering, do you believe in Happy Ever After? And if yes, what does that look like?
Sophie Winkleman: I think I’ve seen it seen from a few very cynical friends who’ve thought it was all nonsense—they tend to be the ones who fall hardest, which is extremely funny to watch. And I’ve seen love happen much later to people. I’ve seen it with an 80-year-old crossword setter who met someone at his local church, and he was like Romeo. I’d become friends with him because I’d written him a fan letter about a crossword; it was the only fan letter I’ve ever written, a very long time ago. And he was a such a happy bachelor! He was a priest who read lots of books and compiled crosswords and he didn’t want for anything. And he met a retired teacher in his local church and suddenly Cupid’s arrow just pierced him in two. He wrote to me about her, these smitten, poetic emails. They had an unbelievable romance, and he was a devoted lover for the last 10 years of his life. So because of people like them, more than the youngies who feel lots of passion hormonally, when people meet each other and they really are twin souls—and I’ve seen it in such moving, slightly unconventional ways—I really do believe in it. It was one of the best love stories I’ve ever witnessed, I have to say.
