‘Sanditon’ Season 2 Episode 4: Behind-the-Scenes of the Big Archery Competition

In Sanditon Season 2 Episode 4, the gang finally gets all together. Lady Denham (Anne Reid) hosts a big fete, Alexander Colbourne (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) leaves the house, and Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) gets to show off her archery skills. The episode’s main set piece — that lavish garden party culminating in a battle of wills between Colbourne and Lennox (Tom Weston-Jones) — was juicy, dreamy, and full of drama. It was pure Sanditon on Masterpiece on PBS!

“Yeah, that was fun!” Rose Williams told Decider of the archery sequence before revealing that she was actually injured on the day of the shoot. “There’s a lot of trickery in the camera there. I was so disappointed because it was something I really wanted to do.”

“Poor Rose had really injured her shoulder,” Ben Lloyd-Hughes said. “She had a whole thing going on of desperately bravely trying to do the archery herself while battling this really bad shoulder injury. And so in the end, I think she needed a kind of crew member to be pulling the string at the same time as she did it. So that was a kind of behind-the-scenes ‘movie magic.'”

According to both Williams and Lloyd-Hughes, that wasn’t the only behind-the-scenes magic they enjoyed. They also got to act in a stunning setting with the camaraderie of almost the full Sanditon Season 2 cast.

“It’s lovely when you have those big scenes where all the cast get together,” Williams said. “The set design was so beautiful. We had these lovely gardens playing as Lady Denham’s garden, with loads of flowers and beautiful period food. We get a treat when it’s those big scenes.”

While Williams enjoyed the lavish setting, Lloyd-Hughes enjoyed being able to work with the other actors.

“The serendipity of the filming was, because we were dealing with a lot of actors in a schedule, you, a lot of the time, film big group things at the very end of the schedule,” he said. “I hadn’t really had many scenes with a lot of other characters until the very end of the schedule. So it was like almost first day of school vibes. Coming in as an actor and a character who wasn’t used to these group scenes and using that kind of energy with a lot of people around…a lot of noise.”

Tom Weston-Jones said, “There aren’t any stunts or hot air balloons or horses galloping through [in the scene], but there’s a lot of characters and there’s a lot of turning points and really just important moments.”

One major important moment? When Colbourne and Lennox came face to face, and later volley to volley against each other. As the competition between the two men heats up, Lennox throws a curve ball and asks Charlotte to stand in for him. When she shoots a bullseye, Colbourne asks her to return the favor for him. However, she fumbles, leaving Lennox the victor. For Weston-Jones, it was a pivotal scene where Lennox began to reveal more of himself to the people of Sanditon.

“There were certain parts of the show where my character really reveals certain things, parts of himself, certain aspects of himself, and this was definitely one of those sequences as well,” Weston-Jones said. “You know, had plenty of fun in the past doing various scenes, but it’s where Lennox really enjoys the game and playing that with Ben… Us both talking about how far we can take it, how in the hand it could be, how subtle we could be with it all. ‘Cause it’s obviously very, very vital and important, but we want it to be as on the hand as possible.”

“I loved the opportunity to kind of use the archery as a physical component of Colbourne’s frustration of emotions,” Lloyd-Hughes added.

Williams revealed they had a professional on set to teach the cast about historical archery. As it happens, Charlotte’s talent with the bow wouldn’t have been all that extraordinary.

“At that time it was a sport that women participated in a lot so it wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary for Charlotte to be skilled at archery because that was kind of a popular women’s sport,” Williams said.

Cricket, shooting, archery…what can’t our girl Charlotte Heywood do?

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