Rose Williams Did Her “Best” to Infuse Jane Austen’s Legacy into ‘Sanditon’s Final Moments

The Sanditon series finale finally wraps up the saga of Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) by giving her the happiest of endings. Not only does the Masterpiece on PBS series end with Charlotte getting to marry her true love, Alexander Colbourne (Ben Lloyd-Hughes), but we also learn that one year later, Mrs. Colbourne is juggling motherhood with a career as a school teacher. Charlotte literally gets to have it all. She gets her man, her family, and her dream job…all in Sanditon.

When Decider chatted with Sanditon star Ben Lloyd-Hughes, he revealed that shooting that final coda wasn’t as idyllic an experience as it looked on screen. “When we were on the promenade that day, there were so many factors, as you can imagine. There’s the cliche of working with children. So there’s a baby and there were lots of kids as well coming in and out of the nursery and there was a nursery door that wasn’t shutting properly and was misspelled. So I think they were gonna have to re-spell it in. Someone had misspelled ‘arithmetic’ or something like that. So they were having to CGI that.”

“There’s the weather, there’s the sound, there’s the time, so there were so many factors at play,” he said, before adding that it was very important to his co-star Rose Williams to get this scene just right. In fact, Lloyd-Hughes revealed that when Williams explained her passion for nailing this scene, it made him reassess what it meant for both Williams and the show.

“She explained it to me really well. I guess I was naive about, ‘Oh, this is just another scene.’ But she really said to me, ‘I’m sorry that we’re taking so long discussing the exact wording of how we’re going to finish, but I’ve been in this journey for so long that it means so much to me of how this will play out. And I’ve talked about it for so long that it’s really important to get it right.'” Lloyd-Hughes said.

“It didn’t occur to me how much it meant to Rose, the exact wording of what I was saying, what she was saying, even just the direction that we were walking. All the little details of that final moment were so important to her and I respected that.”

“I do care,” Rose Williams said when Decider asked her about this. “I do care because I understand it’s a responsibility to the character. We’re obviously an imagined continuation of an Austen. It’s very much an Austen-inspired regency drama. However, I have had the privilege of playing a character that was imagined by her. Like Jane Austen wrote those chapters and I have had that immense privilege. So it was very important for me to really, really focus on what strand of Jane Austen’s legacy speaks to me the loudest and how I could do my best to infuse that into small moments.”

Williams also said that one of the reasons she likes the final scene of Sanditon is that that it brings Charlotte full circle to where we first met her all the way back in Season 1, Episode 1.

“The first time that we see Charlotte, we see her in the grass with a gun. So it was very, very important for me to have the bookend of the show to really represent a circle, represent an arc, represent a progression. But also pull back to that girl that we met in men’s clothes in the grass. And for her to say, ‘A woman can be whatever she wants to be,’ like it had to be that line. It had to be,” Williams said.

“For me, I perceive Charlotte having done all of this ground work. She followed her heart. She has the career, she has the family, but I perceive her to have go on an adventure and built a foundation for her daughters to be able to do exactly what they want to do. They’ll be in a different position to what she was in. So maybe her daughter will want to go to architecture school in London or maybe her daughter will want to leave where they’re living and leave Sanditon and live somewhere else. Maybe her daughter will want to go to Willingden and continue working on a farm.”

“But I think that she’s laid this foundation that she’ll teach to her students and her kids, particularly her daughters, to go and be what you really want to be. Don’t hold back. So that was very important to me.”

After Williams mentioned Charlotte’s daughters, Decider asked if that was confirmation that the baby we see with Mr. and Mrs. Colbourne is indeed a girl.

“I actually, I think [the baby] was a boy on the day, but I’m just rolling with saying that she was a she,” Williams said before apologizing for forgetting if the show’s team had decided on a gender for Baby Colbourne.

“But I’m pretty sure that it was a girl,” Williams said, explaining that a boy baby played the role of the Colbourne daughter.

Lloyd-Hughes was less pre-occupied with his fictional child’s gender and more concerned with the baby’s size.

“Yes, a massive baby. I hope no one lingers too much about the nine months, one year later [time stamp.] ‘Well, hang on: How old is that baby?'” Lloyd-Hughes said, before joking fans “will be picking the bones out of that.”

The Colbourne baby might have been played by an older infant because of child labor laws, but Lloyd-Hughes had no issue playing Colbourne as a doting, hands-on father in the scene. Dads providing childcare for infants is a progressive idea even today, let alone in Regency era England.

“It wasn’t even discussed,” Lloyd-Hughes said before joking, “And maybe that’s just because I’m a great guy and just really down to earth.”

“I think it made perfect sense. Logistically, Colbourne, obviously he’s a busy father with a lot of things on his plate, but if anyone has the time and money to be able to hold a baby on the promenade and not worry about it, it would be him.”

“And he hopefully comes across, which I always thought he was, as a modern thinking —despite when we first meet him and his grumbles about Leo (Flora Mitchell) not being a girl and stuff like that — I think he’s more aware of how society is and that’s not about what he thinks. I think what he thinks is quite modern, forward thinking, but he’s just aware of how society will treat people.”

“And, I mean, I know from personal experience that there is no shame in being the one holding the baby in any shape or form metaphorically,” Lloyd-Hughes said.

There’s certainly no shame in a Jane Austen hero facilitating his lady love’s happily ever after… which is just what Sanditon and star Rose Williams secured for Charlotte.