Olivia Colman Is Haunting In First Look at Hulu's Great Expectations

A new teaser for Great Expectations released by BBC gives the first glimpse of Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham. She appears ghostly, draped in her old wedding gown, adorned with multiple strings of necklaces and some stray garland. From just the 20 seconds shown, it’s clear that Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel will lean into the darkness and eeriness of the tale. The six-part limited series premieres on Hulu on March 26.

Also part of the cast is Fionn Whitehead (Black Mirror: Bandersnatch) as Pip, the young orphan who becomes Miss Havisham’s companion; Shalom Brune-Franklin (The Tourist) as Estella, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter who Pip becomes infatuated with; plus Ashley Thomas, Johnny Harris, Hayley Squires, Owen McDonnell, Trystan Gravelle, Laurie Ogden, Rudi Dharmalingam, Tom Sweet, Chloe Lea, and Matt Berry as Mr. Pumblechook, Pip’s uncle who first brings him to Miss Havisham’s estate.

This will be the first time that universally beloved actors Colman and Berry will share the screen despite both first finding success in British comedies like Peep Show (Colman) and The IT Crowd (Berry). Both have received accolades for their work on television, Berry for his work on Toast of London and What We Do in the Shadows and Colman for Broadchurch, Fleabag and The Crown.

This is the second Dickens novel adapted by Knight — in 2019, he wrote and produced FX’s limited series A Christmas Carol, and the same team of producers, including Ridley Scott and Tom Hardy, are behind this project. And in a completely new version of the “FX on Hulu” partnership, this will be branded as “FX in association with BBC, only on Hulu,” further testing the limits of multi-network collaboration.

Brianna Wellen is a TV Reporter at Primetimer who became obsessed with television when her parents let her stay up late to watch E.R.