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Darcy’s Pride & Prejudice hand flex is inimitable, but these 14 TV and movie moments come close
Exactly 25 minutes and 23 seconds into Pride & Prejudice, Matthew Macfadyen’s Darcy flexes his right hand. One small step for the movies, one giant step for yearners.
If you’re not familiar with the Hand Flex™, let me join you under the rock where you live and explain. Mr. Darcy—tall, handsome, nonchalant—helps Elizabeth Bennet—sharp and headstrong—into a carriage. Their hands touch. Mr. Darcy walks away and the camera pans to his hand, which flexes imperceptibly, almost involuntarily. It makes you want to text that guy you’re in a situationship with, even though you have accepted that romance is dead.
These three seconds of screentime have inspired academic deep dives on YouTube, dramatic retellings on Instagram and long, unsatisfying narrative arcs in my dreams. To yearn for someone, to want them, to need to touch them but to hold yourself back—that’s what the hand flex from Pride & Prejudice is. It’s not just romance, it’s longing. The kind that makes me wonder: ‘What if?’ What if there is some version of it for me in this big, bad world of being left on read? It leaves the question hanging in the air, the tension so thick, you could cut through it.
Here are 14 moments from film and TV that slightly, almost, maybe come close to it:
