Go Behind the Scenes of Persuasion with Mia McKenna-Bruce

A role in the recent Netflix adaptation of Persuasion wasn’t something that Mia McKenna-Bruce, who plays Mary Musgrove, was able to leave behind when the cameras turned off.

“It could be crazy, because we’d be wearing corsets and other period pieces,” the actress explains. “It was like being in a film—obviously we were shooting a film, but it also felt like living in one because you’d look around at one another like what are we doing?”

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The act of playing characters living in the Regency era wasn’t always so easy to leave at work for McKenna-Bruce or her costars, a group that included Dakota Johnson and Henry Golding. “You have to change your mannerisms to suit the period,” McKenna-Bruce says. “We all learned how to hold glasses and cutlery and do all the little things you might not think about. Then, when you’re going about your day everything you do is completely different; you don’t just step off set and leave it behind, you’re still living with bits and pieces of your character.”

Here, she opens her personal camera roll, to share photos from set.