Steven Knight & the Cast Talk What to Expect When You're Expecting FX's 'Great Expectations'

If Shakespeare defined the pop culture of the first Elizabethan era, then Charles Dickens did the same for the Victorian one. From A Christmas Carol, which synthesized Victoria and Albert's push to popularize a secularist Germanic tradition for the industrial age, to David Copperfield, a bildungsroman detailing Victorian manhood, his works help define 19th century England in the popular imagination. One of his last works, Great Expectations, is the sort of novel still assigned in school, filled with classic Dickensian scenes and characters, like the protagonist, the kindly orphan Pip, the cold-hearted Estella, and the famous wedding dress-wearing Miss Havisham.

The story has been adapted for the screen since the black-and-white silent film era, with the first movie version released in 1917. However, it's been a decade since the last one, the 2012 feature film directed and adapted by Mike Newell, starring Jeremy Irvine, Holliday Grainger, and Helena Bonham Carter as Pip, Estella, and Miss Havisham, respectively. This new one is a six-part TV series from the BBC and FX by Peaky Binders' Steven Knight, who also adapted the very controversial retelling of A Christmas Carol in 2019 for both networks.

Unsurprisingly, Knight leans into the misandry and misanthropy threaded throughout, playing up themes from the nearly 200-year-old story that speak to modern audiences. "I'm attracted to the way Dickens writes because it's meant to be episodic," Knight says when asked about his attraction to Dickens projects. "If he [Dickens] were around at the moment, I'm sure he'd be writing movies and streaming television because he has this rhythm to the work where there are these cliffhangers, and things keep happening, so then you have to follow it on, and he does it so beautifully."