How Tom Weston-Jones Swaggered His Way into ‘Sanditon’ Season 2

The Sanditon Season 2 premiere begins with utter tragedy, but ends with a ray of…hope? At least, the Masterpiece on PBS series introduces the grieving Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) to two potential new suitors. Charlotte meets her brooding new employer, Alexander Colbourne (Ben Lloyd-Hughes), and a confident war hero named Colonel Francis Lennox (Tom Weston-Jones). While Colbourne and Charlotte start off on the wrong foot, Colonel Lennox is flirtatious from the start. The redcoat is impressed by our beloved heroine and admires her courageous spirit.

But who exactly is Colonel Lennox and where did the idea for him come from?

Sanditon Season 1 was based on Jane Austen‘s final, unfinished manuscript. The bones of the story represented a thematic departure for the author as its heroes were men of business and its cast of heroines included a woman of color, mixed race heiress Georgiana Lambe (Crystal Clarke). Sanditon embraced Austen’s own ambitions by telling a story that pushed the writer’s tropes into darker, more mature areas. When ITV canceled the show after one season, it seemed Charlotte’s story would end with heartache. Now that Sanditon has been resurrected, the challenge is creating a story for Charlotte without Austen’s intended hero, Sidney Parker (Theo James). Enter Colbourne and Lennox.

“The starting point [for Lennox and Colbourne], I think we were very conscious of what the audience would be feeling at the top of season 2… It would be dealing with the fact that they didn’t get the happy ending that we’d been building, that we were expecting,” Sanditon showrunner Justin Young told Decider. “So, our initial thought was, we don’t want to bring anybody in who is going to feel like ‘Sidney Mark II.’ We don’t want anybody to feel like they’re being compared to Sidney because that would just be brutally unfair.”

Young decided to start Sanditon Season 2 with the idea that Charlotte’s “written off the idea of love and romance,” but given this is a Jane Austen story, love and romance hasn’t written Charlotte off. “We’re playing with the tool box that Jane Austen left behind, so we try to kind of rhyme with certain tropes she had without directly imitating them,” Young said.

For the first of two potential new suitors for Charlotte, Young went to the tropes of soldiers like Sense and Sensibility‘s Colonel Brandon or Pride & Prejudice‘s Mr. Wickham. In fact, Young revealed to Decider that the plan for Sanditon Season 2 always hinged on the arrival of Redcoats to the charming coastal town.

“Even before we got canceled in the UK, we were thinking of a hypothetical Season 2. We knew we wanted the army to come in,” Young said. “Once we knew Sidney wasn’t returning, well, it makes sense to have a war hero because we’re five years on from the Napoleonic wars. And we thought actually having this man who is dashing would be a fantastic new energy.”

“So it kind of followed that we had one of these men is very front-foot and very energized, and the other man had to be the antithesis of that,” Young said. The other man — the antithesis — would be Ben Lloyd-Hughes’s Alexander Colbourne. But it was in actor Tom Weston-Jones that Young found his dashing war hero, Colonel Francis Lennox.

“We already knew Tom,” Young said, revealing that he and fellow Sanditon executive producer Belinda Campbell had worked with Weston-Jones before on the show Dickensian. “We knew that he has this fantastic leading man quality, a fantastic dash and swagger about him.”

Tom Weston-Jones is a British actor who was raised by actor parents in Dubai. After returning to the UK for theatre training, Weston-Jones began making a name for himself in series like Copper and the aforementioned Dickensian. Most recently, though, he starred in the cult hit Warrior, a martial arts period drama. Weston-Jones told Decider that he was aware of Sanditon when it aired in the UK in 2019 because his old drama school mate Theo James was in it, but he didn’t really think about the show until getting the call to audition for Season 2.

“I didn’t even know it had been renewed and I didn’t think about that,” Weston-Jones told Decider. “But as soon as the scripts came in and as soon as Justin gave me information about the character, I jumped at the opportunity. I was really excited to play Lennox.”

“As soon as I got my head around who he was and what his place was within the story in the world, I just, yeah, I jumped to the opportunity,” Weston-Jones said.

“We knew that he has this fantastic leading man quality, a fantastic dash and swagger about him.” – Sanditon showrunner Justin Young

It’s clear from the start of Sanditon Season 2 that Colonel Lennox is smitten by Charlotte. Decider asked Weston-Jones what it was about Charlotte that captivated Lennox so early on.

“I think it’s just that she’s a bit of an aberration in the town itself. He’s quite used to the setup of moving from town to town, from place to place, meeting people. I think there’s a certain pattern to his life and a certain, I don’t want to say habit, but I think he could probably fall back on that and so nothing really surprises him,” Weston-Jones said. “So when Charlotte comes into it, when he meets her and she doesn’t respond in the way that he expects or wants or hopes, it stops him in his tracks and makes him recalibrate and makes him angled towards a path that I don’t think he necessarily would have at all considered for himself in any other town with any other woman.”

“So yeah, I think it’s just the sheer surprise. But not only does he meet someone who he’s physically attracted to, but there is a genuine connection there which he hasn’t really felt in a very long time,” Weston-Jones said.

Weston-Jones revealed he had some trepidation joining Sanditon Season 2 as it was the first time he joined a production in Season 2, or a “train that’s already left the tracks.” The collaborative nature of the cast and crew soon put him at ease, as did the way Sanditon bucks expectations of its own genre.

“Period dramas are done, you know, quite often in certain countries. And they have a certain pattern that people come to expect and things,” he said. “And what I enjoyed was that no one was really talking about their characters in those terms. We were talking about them as real people. [We were] trying to work the scenes and the relationships as much as we could. And that just felt great. Like, it didn’t feel that all like anyone was settling.”

“It felt like everyone was working really hard and that’s exactly the environment that I want to be in. So, yeah, really loved it. And we’ll miss everybody actually. Really enjoyed working with them,” Weston-Jones said.

Of course, Colonel Lennox is not the only gentleman in Charlotte’s orbit this season on Sanditon. Tomorrow Decider will look at the other new man in Miss Heywood’s life…Alexander Colbourne, aka Ben Lloyd-Hughes.

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