THIS ACTRESS IS DEFINITELY NOT CURSED
Cursed
Streaming, Netflix
When Shalom Brune-franklin made her first appearance in the BBC drama Our Girl set in Afghanistan, the response from viewers was immediate. Her character Private Maisie Richards, an irreverent tomboy with a foghorn laugh, started trending on Twitter and made the next morning’s headlines.
While some adored Richards’ spark, others were unimpressed by her rather sardonic humour as she joked with traumatized locals about earthquakes. “That girl is a nightmare,” tweeted one viewer.
Brune-franklin did not take it well. “I remember crying to my mom,” she says from Australia. “It was overwhelming because I’d never experienced people speaking about me like that. Some people hated Maisie, and I was so upset, but then my mom said, ‘But isn’t that the point? She’s meant to be unlikeable.’ And then I realized, OK, yes, I’ve done my job.”
Undeterred by this baptism of fire, Brune-franklin is fast becoming an exciting, consistent presence on TV. She is soon to appear in David Hare’s political thriller Roadkill and is about to resume filming on the latest series of Line of Duty, which was halted due to the pandemic, both for the BBC.
This week she will reach a whole new audience with Cursed, Netflix’s biggest new series of the summer, which has been hailed as the new Game of Thrones.
Adapted from Thomas Wheeler and Frank Miller’s bestselling book of the same name, Cursed is an epic, 10-episode retelling of the Arthurian legends, dizzy with magic, folklore and nail-biting battles. It is also a show that speaks to the moment; a fresh feminist fairy tale that looks set to revolutionize the fantasy genre. Here, it is the Lady of the Lake (Katherine Langford), not Arthur (played by Devon Terrell) who carries the sword. Brune-franklin plays Igraine, a fiery, courageous nun (originally Arthur’s mother in the legends). While Game of Thrones was severely criticized in some quarters for having no black characters, Cursed offers a corrective and for Brune-franklin (born to a Mauritian mother and Thai father), it was a dream come true “to be in something medieval”.
“Myself and (fellow cast member) Adaku Ononogbo were on set in full costume and we looked at each other and said, ‘We can’t believe this!’ It was a big moment: two black women on set going, ‘How cool is this?’”
Brune-franklin, now 25, grew up in St. Albans, England, but moved to Perth in Australia at 15 when her parents went in search of a better life. Her mother decided to take up bodybuilding while her father became a chef. Motivated by her parents’ determination, Brune-franklin enrolled in the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts despite having seen virtually no television and just two pantomimes on stage.
“I’m such an unlikely suspect in this industry,” she says, with only the faintest of Aussie accents. “But watching my parents has been my biggest inspiration. They decided they’d rather struggle by the sea than struggle in a council flat, so they picked their whole lives up and reinvented themselves as people. My mom has always been a hustler — when we first moved to Australia she couldn’t even run around the block, so someone suggested she should take up bodybuilding. She won two competitions, and now she works in government. My parents lead by example with hard work.”