It's slightly nerve-wracking meeting Golda Rosheuvel. This is, after all, the actress who, as Bridgerton’s Queen Charlotte, personifies haughty impatience, with the ultimate power to break and make lives. Remember her plucking Daphne Bridgerton out of the parade of curtseying debs with an approving ‘Flawless, my dear’? In the much-awaited second season, she’s back on her throne emanating impatience as she awaits ‘the season’s diamond, wherever she may be’.
Queen Charlotte may be a popular character in the Bridgerton universe. But Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the real Queen Charlotte, was a captivating historical figure
The woman I encounter at Soho House on Dean Street is nothing like that imperious monarch. In a black jacket and a yellow patterned scarf ‘from a great little place on the Walworth Road’, the real-life Rosheuvel – whose Bridgerton character Rishi Sunak named as his favourite – couldn’t be more upbeat and open. Bereft of her trademark Marie Antoinette wigs, with black-rimmed specs framing her lively eyes, the 52-year-old says she is rarely spotted in public. ‘Which is good. But at the same time, you want your work to be recognised,’ she says in beautifully modulated tones that speak of a middle-class Home Counties childhood. (She now lives in Camberwell, south London, with her partner, the playwright Shireen Mula.)
What she does share with George III’s consort – the only character in Bridgerton not to appear in Julia Quinn’s original Regency-set novels and the only one based on a real person – is a sharp wit and an aura of unshakeable self-worth. It’s the result of a happy and secure upbringing, in which her Guyanese father and English mother lavished her with encouragement: ‘My younger brother and I had our own minds and we were never told we couldn’t do something. That’s so important.’
Much was made, when Bridgerton first entered our lives on Christmas Day 2020, of how mixed-race Rosheuvel had been cast in accordance with some historians’ belief that Queen Charlotte was of African descent. But given the show’s colour-blind casting, Rosheuvel herself wasn’t particularly concerned about whether that theory was accurate or not. ‘I did some research into Queen Charlotte, but it wasn’t really a deep dive,’ she says. ‘Bridgerton is more of a meta, fantasy world than a documentary – an amazing genre piece, pushed and twisted to work with our modern sensibilities.’ Anyway, she adds, ‘I didn’t need to do much research because I knew the world this character came from already – it was my mother’s world and that makes her very easy to play. Every time I dress up as Queen Charlotte, I pay homage to my mother.’
Although Rosheuvel spent much of her career ‘playing black’, in roles, as she puts it, ‘very much perceived by casting teams as lower status, like the maid, the servant, the driver’, the environment she was brought up in far more closely resembled the high society over which Queen Charlotte presides. Her mother, Judith, came from an ‘upper-middle-class London family’, she says. ‘Before the war they had butlers; their world was very public school. My grandfather was the headmaster of Colet Court [St Paul’s prep school], my great-uncle was Bishop of Barbados, later Archbishop of Jamaica, and when my mother visited him there, she had dinner with Princess Margaret.’
Judith was a twentysomething staying with her uncle in Barbados – she set up the country’s first social-work association – when she met her husband-to-be, Siegfried, a Guyanese priest and son of a midwife mother and a man who’d done everything from shopkeeping to gold-mining. Siegfried was participating in a music event and the pair found themselves standing next to each other in the choir: ‘My dad started to sing and my mum said that it was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. It ignited the flames of love. It was a mad set-up at that time: a black man and white woman getting together. There’s always pressure being a biracial couple, but both my grandmothers were such warm, friendly, generous people, so it never was a problem.’
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Once married, the couple based themselves in Guyana, South America, where Siegfried moved around the country performing missionary work, while Judith taught in schools. ‘With me there as a babe on my mum’s back, we’d be going into the bush with the tribes for two weeks administering holy communion for the indigenous people,’ Rosheuvel says.
When Rosheuvel was five, the family relocated to England. Siegfried became a Church of England clergyman and later a prison chaplain, and Judith a social worker helping people with dementia. They continued to move around the UK, from Sheffield to Nottingham to Bishop’s Stortford in Essex, where Rosheuvel attended the local comprehensive St Mary’s, also the alma mater of singer Sam Smith.
Rosheuvel’s acting debut was in a touring performance of Hair, and since then she has appeared in countless stage productions, including Porgy and Bess, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Othello (she played the eponymous, jealousy-consumed general as a lesbian), as well as telly staples such as Holby City, Luther and Silent Witness.
Still, hers was a steady rather than a meteoric rise, with Rosheuvel never quite sure if racism was blocking her path or not: ‘The majority of my experiences were positive but there were moments when I went up for parts and you’re not black enough for one and not white enough for another, so it was about managing that disappointment. It was frustrating and confusing.’
Characteristically, she refused to be downcast: ‘I’ve been pushed back, but I’ve leapt over and stepped 10 feet further. I’m a great believer in waiting, in biding my time, being confident enough in my craft and who I am as a person to know that it will happen, that one day someone would see me and go, “Right, you are perfect for playing the Queen of England.”’
In fact, Bridgerton producers originally auditioned her in 2018 for the role of Lady Danbury, a part that went to her dear friend Adjoa Andoh. But shortly afterwards, they asked her to send in an audition tape for the queen: ‘I did it in half an hour. It was the easiest tape I’ve ever done.’
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Naturally, Rosheuvel had no idea of the phenomenon she’d signed up for. Within the first four weeks of its release on 25 December 2020, Bridgerton had captivated 82 million viewers worldwide, and became Netflix’s most-watched series to date: ‘We were having a great time filming it but we thought we were doing a little costume drama. Then Christmas Day came and everyone was just like, “Wow!” Everybody loved it.’
It helped that audiences worldwide were in lockdown. ‘The stars were aligned. We were desperate for escapism, for something that was going to give us joy and lovely costumes and gossip, but also characters that have some substance,’ she says. Unable to celebrate the show’s success in person because of the pandemic restrictions, she, Ruth Gemmell (Lady Bridgerton), Hugh Sachs (who plays her on-screen butler) and Geraldine Alexander (the Bridgertons’ housekeeper) met on Zoom once a month. ‘It was what kept us going.’
Returning to film season two last spring came as a massive relief: ‘It was like family getting back together. Our favourite scenes are the ball scenes because it’s the only time we’re all together and you get to catch up on people’s children, their husbands, their dogs. The directors find it quite difficult with everybody chat, chat, chatting away. They’re like, “Come on!”’
Did she feel intimidated by the behemoth Bridgerton had become? ‘I just didn’t think about it that much, so it wasn’t too daunting,’ she says.
Season one touched upon Queen Charlotte’s inner turmoil as she witnessed her husband gripped by mental illness, and season two explores those intimate moments even further: ‘I’m pleased they keep pushing the journey of her private life, so it’s not just about the glamour of the balls but also a deep delve into her heart. You’ll see a lot more of the yin to her yang. I just love that she’s such a complex character; she’s mischievous, dedicated to the Crown, dedicated to the gossip and the pomp and ceremony. It’s so fun to play.’
Rosheuvel doesn’t even mind the two hours it takes to fit the queen’s trademark wigs, which she often has to wear for 11 hours straight: ‘But once they’re on, they definitely inform the character. I look in the mirror and think, “She’s here!” I love it, even though by 4pm your back is killing you and your head is on fire.’
Meanwhile, her corsets and crinolines mean ‘peeing can take around 20 minutes. And there have been some scary times when my body has heated up and sweated, so at the end of a long day I can’t get out of the corset and for insurance reasons they’ve had to call a medic to help me.’
Clearly, she’s doing everything right, as the show’s producer Shonda Rhimes called her last year with the news that – in addition to the two more seasons of Bridgerton already commissioned – she was planning a spin-off prequel series about the young Queen Charlotte, as well as the stories of Lady Danbury and Lady Bridgerton. ‘I said to Shonda, “This is a real moment in terms of older women. From Mamma Bridgerton, who is a strong single mother, to Lady Danbury and myself, to be celebrated in this way is just phenomenal. Our job is done,”’ Rosheuvel says.
Rosheuvel may be at the top of her acting game now, but things were almost very different. As a teenager, her main passion was athletics: ‘From a very early age I thought, “I’m going to be in the Olympics. I want to be in the decathlon” – it was the time of Tessa Sanderson, Daley Thompson, Flo-Jo Joyner. But I loved it all. I played hockey and netball and swam for my county. I broke records for my four-by-four relay, my javelin, my long-jumping. It was full-on.’
But all that ended abruptly when, aged 16, Rosheuvel injured her ankle: ‘I had to have a break, so I moved on to acting and it just took off.’ Does she ever have a ‘sliding doors’ moment wondering about her alternative career? ‘I did when I was an out-of-work actress sitting at my mother’s house watching the 2012 Olympics, thinking, “That could have been me!”’ Would she have been a medallist? ‘Without a doubt!’
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Growing up, her parents encouraged her to read, and classical music was always playing in the background (her brother John, 48, who’s now a composer, was a chorister at King’s College, Cambridge). ‘It was all very scones with clotted cream and jam for tea and nice roast dinners. But at the same time, the aroma we’d wake up to on Christmas Day was garlic pork, marinated for eight weeks because that was a South American tradition. And though I’m vegan now, I used to love jerk chicken and rice. I feel very lucky that I’ve had two worlds that have been united like that.’
Even though the Home Counties were hardly a multicultural hotbed, Rosheuvel never knowingly experienced racism. ‘Maybe my parents shielded us, or maybe it was a reflection of the church, but all the communities we have been in were very positive. I know some people have an awful time [with racism] but there are also people like me with positive stories and they should be celebrated.’
Nor was her sexuality problematic. Rosheuvel was sure from a young age that she was gay: ‘Like everything in my life, I just knew what I was; it was natural.’ Coming out to her parents in her early twenties, she first met a hesitant: ‘“Oh. OK. Right…” But that didn’t last long. You hear some stories that are horrific and this wasn’t at all. Because of my parents’ love for humanity, they knew people like me already, so it was really good.’
Her Bridgerton triumph, though, came after a tough decade. Her father had died two years previously, six years after suffering a stroke. Then, in May 2020, she lost her mother. ‘It was a long and sad story. It wasn’t Covid, but it was the result of lockdown. It’s one of those moments where I had to go, “It’s OK. It’s a hurdle but I’m climbing slowly over it.” Mum never got to see an episode of Bridgerton, but she got to see photos and footage. Her body gave up but her mind was as sharp as a pin. It’s such a shame because she would have loved it.’ Even its infamous rumpy pumpy? ‘Oh, she’d have had no trouble with that, she’s seen me naked and having sex on stage lots of times. And anyway, the Bridgerton sex scenes aren’t mine.’
Rosheuvel is now so busy with Bridgerton (since Quinn’s series had eight books in it, there is quiet optimism that Netflix will follow suit) there’s not much time to explore other acting opportunities, though she is hoping to squeeze in some stage work. Her partner Mula’s support throughout this period has been ‘invaluable’, says Rosheuvel. The two of them met eight years ago on a dancefloor and have been together ever since. They don’t have children, but Rosheuvel is an involved godmother. ‘The [Bridgerton] attention has been a big adjustment and it’s great to have somebody there who can hold you in the moments you find difficult and help you navigate the ups and downs,’ she says. It also helps that the attention has come ‘at the right time, when I’m a bit older’.
Dear reader, the next instalment of Bridgerton is drawing ever closer
Meanwhile, Rosheuvel has watched the two stars of season one, Phoebe Dynevor and Regé-Jean Page (who has now left the show), experience a global fame Dynevor described as ‘out-of-the-body and weird’. Rosheuvel adds: ‘All those kids – as we call them – in the cast have good support. We have a few WhatsApp groups and there’s a very, very vibrant season two group.’
Has sitting on a fictional throne made Rosheuvel a fan of the current royal family? ‘I like to see the royals as human beings, trying to live a life, and I think we often miss that. They’re set at a height of perceived unattainability, but to me, they’re just guys and gals trying to live their lives in the best way they can.’ Which is exactly what could be said of Rosheuvel.
This article was originally published in the April 2022 issue.
