Bridgerton isn’t a documentary… but Regency-era Britain WAS hugely diverse
Playing Lady Danbury in the ‘colourblind’ Netflix hit has made Adjoa Andoh a superstar. Ahead of the show’s glorious third season, she talks gruelling 15hour days filming, planting trees in Africa for charity and asking Alan Titchmarsh for gardening advic
SHE’S been showbiz royalty since starring as the acerbic high-society matriarch Lady Danbury in Netflix’s global-smash period drama Bridgerton. And Adjoa Andoh knows her fair share of A-listers, having appeared opposite Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon in Clint Eastwood’s sport biopic Invictus. So it’s something of a surprise to discover the last time the 61-year-old AngloGhanaian actress was “properly starstruck” was when she bumped into Tony Adams in the queue for a loo.
The passionate football fan, albeit a Leeds United supporter, bursts into laughter recalling the moment she clocked the then Gunners’ captain: “I just looked at him and said, ‘You’re Tony Adams!’ He looked at me and he went, ‘Yes, I am.’” Shocked and flustered, Adjoa could only reply: “Okay… bye!”, which she demonstrates in a highpitched squeak as she cracks up for a second time: “You don’t really expect it [to see a celebrity] walking out of a toilet, but it was Tony Adams, and I love him.”
The Adams encounter was in the 90s, she tells me, but Adjoa has now joined the ranks of global celebrity herself.
A successful actress over three decades, Bridgerton sent her profile soaring. She is regularly accosted by fans everywhere from France to Cambodia.
Earlier this year, she admits she stopped traffic in northern Ghana as she lugged shopping bags along a street in sweltering heat. Spotting the actress, a female driver executed an emergency stop, flung her car door open and ran at her as other drivers angrily beeped their horns.
The young woman enveloped Adjoa in a hug and dissolved into floods of tears, before telling her: “We are so happy for what you are doing for us!”
By that, she means the high-profile cast of black characters in the gloriously high-end Regency romantic romp created by US producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes from the bestselling Bridgerton novels by American author Julia Quinn.
“You get to know the politicking, strategising, intrigue, romance, friendship, challenges,” says Adjoa. “All that’s happening within the ‘Ton’, which is the court, which is ruled over by Queen Charlotte with Lady Danbury as the arch manipulator.”
The show returns for its third season next month, with the focus this time on the romance of “wallflower” Penelope Featherington, played by Nicola Coughlan, and Luke Newton’s Colin Bridgerton.
“There’s a sense that the wallflower comes off the wall and stands in her glory, and the sun shines on her,” says Adjoa.
BRIDGERTON is known for its multiracial characters but Adjoa rejects criticism of so-called “colourblind” casting that is sometimes levelled at the historical drama. “Britain in that period was hugely diverse because it was going out to the world and the world was coming into it and had been since the 1500s,” she insists.
“But the show isn’t a documentary, it gives a flavour of the variety and the energy of what London would have been like as the capital of this tiny little island that punched above its weight.”
Hence the tears she encountered in Ghana. Bristol-born Adjoa, whose father is Ghanaian, was visiting the West Africa country with Tree Aid, a UK charity set up by Bristolian foresters who mitigate the effects of climate change and poverty across the continent by planting trees.
It is one of 248 environmental charities hoping to benefit from the Big Give’s Green Match Fund in conjunction with World Earth Day on Monday. The match-giving fund, which doubles public donations to charities, has set a target of raising £6million in seven days. Like British farmers in recent months, Ghanaian farmers are struggling with an increase of torrential downpours causing agricultural and economic chaos.
More recently, they suffered the usual volume of four months of rainfall in two months, which the parched land simply cannot absorb.
“These poor farming communities, as we know well in this country, have their lives dictated to them by the weather,” explains Adjoa.
“It washes away the topsoil, silts up the rivers and batters crops. I was told about pregnant women not being able to get to hospital because the roads have literally been washed away. By planting indigenous trees and crops in their shade, it holds the soil so it doesn’t wash into the river and you can start to rebuild the agriculture that you’re planting.” She also saw local villagers demonstrate how shea nuts from the indigenous Vitellari tree provide local income through the production of shea butter moisturisers sold in the West.
“The women crushed and soaked the nuts, boiled them and then extracted the oil. So we don’t only need the trees to hold the soil in place but as a product to take to market.”
We’re speaking as Adjoa is having her own – small-scale but nonetheless poignant – weather-related nature emergency.
She is in the back seat of a car en route to film Love Your Weekend with broadcaster Alan Titchmarsh whose gardening expertise she requires. “There is a beautiful cherry tree outside our house and the winds in London yesterday were so crazy that it snapped off in half at the trunk. It happened all across Lambeth,” says Adjoa, who lives in Brixton, south London.
She grabbed a couple of branches before council workers removed the rest.
“I’m going to get my mum to see if I can save it but I’m going to ask Alan today if we can grow another tree from it,” she says. Adjoa’s love of nature derives from her gardening-mad parents and rural upbringing in 1960s and 1970s Gloucestershire.
She lived in the idyllic-sounding village of Wickwar, an area serviced by just two buses a week and surrounded by sweeping fields of cows and sheeps.
“Laurie Lee’s book Cider With Rosie is almost a documentary of my childhood,” she tells me. Like many children from her
generation, she’d stay out all day and not return until tea time in the summer holidays. “We’d climb trees, muck about down the stream, going on adventures down by the old quarry,” she recalls.
“There was a bluebell wood by the playing fields near my home with a high grassy copse where you could find rabbits.
“I would sit in there with my Secret Seven books and a pack of Juicy Fruit – which I thought was the fanciest thing you could ever get – and I’d read for hours. “It was a childhood of walking, playing in nature, lying in a field of buttercups looking at the sky and the vapour trails. It was making dens and having adventures and kids being free.We’d also go round the back of the garages and make go-karts out of pram wheels and race them.
“Playing rounders, crickets, rope swings over the stream.”
It wasn’t without hardship. Adjoa has previously spoken about the racism she experienced at school as part of a mixed race family. Her father was a former journalist who relocated to Bristol and retrained as an accountant after a military coup in Ghana outlawed press freedoms.
He met Adjoa’s mother, a white English teacher, and raised her and her brother,Yeofi, now a musician, in the countryside.
Both are still alive, although sadly no longer together. Adjoa’s father, 91, is now remarried, while her mum is 83. She sees them all regularly. “I am so lucky,” she admits. And they’ve been fortunate to enjoy her success. Before her big Hollywood break, Adjoa played Francine Jones in two series of Doctor Who and three seasons on Casualty as strong-minded nurse Colette Griffiths.
She’s also worked extensively on stage too with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National and Royal Court theatres.
She originally studied law for two years at university before deciding to pursue acting as her career.
“My dad, frankly, is still waiting for me to finish it,” she jokes.
“I think the brain has passed on from being able to manage that. But my parents are proud I get to do a job that makes me happy and with which I can support my family [she has three children with her author husband Howard Cunnell]. That’s not always the case with everybody in my profession.”
Bridgerton has been life-changing for her. But boy, oh boy, does she suffer for her art.
“I’ve got a number one and a half buzzcut so the hair and makeup department had to develop 360 degree wigs involving multiple hair pieces so you can shoot from any angle and it looks convincing,” she smiles.
“It’s a three-and-a-half hour round trip to get transformed from little me into swanky Lady Danbury. I’ll be in the make up chair by about 4am and I’ll leave at 9pm so my days are long. But as my husband says, ‘You’re not down the pit!’ And he’s got a fair point there.”
LADY Danbury famously wears carries a cane, which Adjoa calls her “swagger stick”. “I always wanted her to have swaggery hats. Her suits are masculine and feminine together.
“Because she’s a widow and independent, I wanted her to have both so the tailoring, buttoning, sleeving, edging are off the charts.”
She believes they are deserving of public exhibition.
“We need a V&A respective of the Bridgerton costumes and wigs – I’m sure people would love it,” she says.
An avid reader, outside of Bridgerton she loves narrating audiobooks and right now she’s recording John le Carré’s classic The Little Drummer Girl.
“I do lots of different things as I’ve got a bit of a fidgety brain,” she says. “Going to do some 21st century creepy crime stuff last year with no wigs or corsets involved was a lovely change.”
She’s referring to her part in upcoming chilling crime drama The Red King on Alibi filmed in Northumberland.
The six-part drama follows a police sergeant sent to a Welsh island to investigate the strange goings-ons of islanders following the disappearance of a teenage boy. “It’s properly creepy. It’s like a cop show meets the Wicker Man,” Adjoa says.
Our time has come to an end.
Adjoa has arrived to meet Alan, which reminds her of the other time in her life, aside from Tony Adams, that she was starstruck. It was two years ago when Alan introduced her to the late Queen Elizabeth II at her Platinum Jubilee Celebration.
“Honestly, I turned to mush,” laughs Adjoa. “I remembered to curtsey and I remembered to say Ma’am, not Ma’arm. But it was like someone shot a 1,000-watt lightbulb in my face.”
The Queen handled Adjoa’s deer-in-theheadlines moment with impeccable charm.
“Her attention was entirely on me from the moment she spoke to me,” says Adjoa. “She was funny, she was engaged, it was a really glorious moment.”
She adds with a chuckle: “So Tony Adams and her Maj.There we are!”
There we are, indeed.
●●To donate and have your Big Give donation doubled, search for Tree Aid at biggive.org before noon on Thursday. Season three of Bridgerton is released on Netflix on May 16