Young lovers come and go but the Queen remains, adored by millions, immutable in her pomp and circumstance. In the early days of her reign, she appeared to be little more than a wig-maker’s fancy, a bejewelled figurehead with a disdainful sneer. But at some point over the course of the first season of the Netflix costume drama Bridgerton, the remote character of Queen Charlotte stepped down from her pedestal to become a cult figure in her own right.
Not only is she very much in the foreground of the second series, presiding over her menageries of exotic animals and aristos, but she is shortly to have her very own spin-off series, delving into her background. Meanwhile, in a hard-to-find warehouse in west London, she presides over the Bridgerton Ball – an immersive fanfest hosted by Secret Cinema, where devotees in full fancy dress queue up to see her.
So it’s quite a moment when the Queen, AKA actor Golda Rosheuvel, arrives at the Guardian offices with an advance guard of hat boxes and stylists. She is starting with a photoshoot, and when I pop my head in to ask if she would like anything to drink, she commands “water” in an imperious voice without moving her head or condescending to shift her eyes away from the camera. When Rosheuvel emerges, out of costume, to be interviewed, she is warm and animated, and falls on the water like a woman who has been standing for hours with a sheep on her head.
In a way, that’s exactly what it is like every time she does anything Bridgerton-related. The Queen’s wigs – towering constructions of spun wool and jewels, of which I counted four in the first episode of the new series alone – set the tone of a period mashup in which Regency debutantes dance the quadrille to Madonna’s Material Girl. “The relationship with the wigs is really important,” Rosheuvel says. “In the first season, they were quite heavy. They were works of art, weren’t they? In the second season, we’ve got a different team on board. And, joyfully, I’m more collaborative with this team. So there are lots of fittings, lots of discussions, lots of creating the look actually on my head in the room. I’m definitely in a relationship with the wigs.”
But Queen Charlotte is also more than her wigs; she is the doyenne of the marriage market, the fixer who decides which young woman will bag the most eligible duke or viscount by declaring them the season’s “diamond”. Last season’s diamond, Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor), is now a happily married mother, albeit with an absentee husband, after the swoon-worthy Regé-Jean Page quit the series. So it falls to Daphne’s judgmental older brother (Jonathan Bailey) to pick up the romantic lead with a couple of sisters recently returned from India – the ingenue Edwina Sharma (Charithra Chandran), who is quickly identified as the new diamond, and her dashing but prickly older sister Kate (Simone Ashley).
Rosheuvel’s eyes widen in surprise when I suggest her character might be in danger of stealing the show, the first series of which is estimated to have been viewed by 82 million households. While the younger characters smile and simper, Charlotte is the queen of the meme-friendly pout and putdown: a best-moments compilation is entitled “Queen Charlotte being in a mood for four and a half minutes straight”. But she is also relatable: she loves a gossip, and is excitedly scandalised when mystery pamphleteer Lady Whistledown starts spilling all the secrets of the “ton” (the regency term for high society).
Rosheuvel originally auditioned for the role of the Queen’s confidante, Lady Danbury. When that went to Adjoa Andoh, she was asked if she would consider reapplying. It was just before Christmas and she was about to set off for a holiday in France. “I only really had an afternoon to do it in. But I said to my agent: I’ll have a go.” With the help of her partner, the playwright Shireen Mula, she whacked a couple of scenes on to a demo tape, then forgot about it. A few days later, her agent rang and said the director had liked the tape and had sent it on to the producer, Shonda Rhimes. “There was a part of me that didn’t quite believe it, because I never think that anybody’s going to like what I do. But also part of me was jaw-droppingly excited,” Rosheuvel says.
She knew of Rhimes’s production company, Shondaland, through the box set of its previous production Scandal, which became her guide and inspiration as she prepared for the biggest stage challenge of her career: playing a lesbian Othello at Liverpool’s Everyman theatre in 2018. Scandal featured Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope, a White House communications chief turned political fixer. “She was kind of my Othello: a strong Black actress playing a powerful character in this powerful world,” Rosheuvel says.
Bridgerton is based on a series of romantic novels published by the American author Julia Quinn from 2000, which were reframed by Rhimes and showrunner Chris Van Dusen in a Regency society predicated on the real-life speculation that Queen Charlotte – the German-born wife of King George III – was of mixed heritage. “There was this idea of ‘what if?’,” says Rosheuvel. “What if Queen Charlotte is a person of colour? What does that do to the world that we are trying to create? Chris Van Dusen calls it conscious casting, not colourblind casting, because we are consciously creating this world. And, in doing it, the representation that we see in our own world is reflected back at us. It enables us to celebrate the kings and queens of this industry, who are people of colour, through the characters that we create in this fictitious world.”
Rosheuvel herself is the older of two children born to a Guyanese father – a Church of England priest – and an English mother, who was a social worker specialising in dementia. Both were deeply musical: they met through a choir, and continued to combine work and music, in choirs and orchestras, after emigrating from Guyana to England when both their children were under five. Her younger brother went on to shine as a chorister at King’s College, Cambridge, and is now a music producer.
But Rosheuvel struggled academically at school, and couldn’t settle to an instrument. “I’m dyslexic, so I find reading and writing very difficult. I discovered that my instrument was my voice,” she says. She starred in Bugsy Malone, but she also shone on the sports field, where she competed as a decathlete. “And I was bloody good,” she says. “I broke a few school records, a few county records as well.” When her sporting ambitions were derailed by a bad ankle sprain, she changed tack and enrolled at 16 for a drama diploma.
Her name may sound unfamiliar, but if you’ve watched any soaps over the last two decades you will have seen her in police stations or hospital wards: she saw Sally Webster through cancer on Coronation Street, delivered Linda Carter’s baby on EastEnders, and treated Doctor Who’s companion Martha Jones when she was attacked by the resurrection gauntlet in Torchwood. She was on stage in a minor role, in the West End hit The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, when the ceiling collapsed in 2013.
But then, she says, “I took myself out of work, and made myself unemployed, because I was frustrated about the parts that I was getting: you do them for a while when you’re getting established, but they were stereotypical Black parts, and I got to a point where I wanted more. I really had to sit down and work out where the frustration was coming from and what I could do about it,” she says.
The lightbulb moment came with the realisation that it wasn’t the parts themselves that were the problem. “The parts were great. I didn’t mind playing the nurse, the policewoman, the mum with a wayward child. But I wanted them to be part of the storyline, not just a side note.” For the best part of a year she turned down all offers. It was 2012, the year when the Olympics came to London. “I was sitting on my couch thinking: ‘How ironic is this? This is what I was training for. I’m watching what could have been.’ It was bizarre. I took a risk, but it worked.”
Gradually, better offers began to roll in, often with a revisionist twist. She played Mercutio as a female clown at the Globe, and a season of plays at the Liverpool Everyman that not only included her mould-breaking Othello, but roles in the musical Paint Your Wagon and a reimagining of Peer Gynt, The Big I Am. Then came “a really great, chunky role” in Silent Witness, as well as the Old Vic’s hit A Christmas Carol, where she played the Ghost of Christmas Present, and most recently, the epic fantasy film Dune, in which she was housekeeper Shadout Mapes.
She lives in south London with Mula, whom she met “the old-fashioned way – at a mate’s party”. They’ve been together nine years and are touchingly devoted. “Lover you are my world. You came to bring me home. You cleaned you packed you sorted it all out when I was doing 2 shows,” she tweeted, at the end of her Liverpool run.
An audience with a member of the Bridgerton cast would not be complete without a delicious piece of society gossip, and Rosheuvel duly delivers, revealing that the Queen’s consort is one of the writers on the Bridgerton Ball. “I don’t think Secret Cinema actually knows that I’m Shireen’s partner. We’ve never said anything, which is fun,” she confides. Eat your heart out, Lady Whistledown.
Bridgerton season two is on Netflix from 25 March.