More thanwindowdressing: Bridgerton star on colourism
Bridgerton star Charithra Chandran believes the colour-conscious casting of the steamy Georgian drama has been key to the show’s success.
The hit Netflix series returns to screens on Friday and Chandran, the daughter of Indian doctors, is full of praise for casting several non-white actors in leading roles.
“So I think as a society, we’ve just become more creative,” she said.
Chandran, 25, plays Edwina Sharma, a stunning debutante being chaperoned around Bridgerton’s marriage market by her elder sister, Kate.
The actress is passionate about using her visibility to “fight and push back on colourism”, which she explains she has been conscious of since she was a child.
“I remember strangers saying, ‘ You would be pretty if you were light-skinned like your grandmother,’ and like, trying to blame my granddad for giving me my skin colour,” she said. “People assume my success is due to a diversity quota. I’ve even had friends say to me, ‘Oh you got that because you’re brown,’ and that really hurts. What’s really scary is that you can start believing it and think, ‘ The only reason I got cast as Edwina is because they were looking for an Indian family’.”
Chandran, who stars alongside Simone Ashley and Jonathan Bailey in the smash-hit drama, has also revealed that she was born in Perth. Her mother and father had left their native country in the early ’90s to pursue their medical training.
She was still a young child when her parents’ marriage broke down and she and her father moved back to India, where she lived with her grandparents in Tamil Nadu before moving back to the UK when she was four.
Colourism is, she says, unfortunately still rife in the entertainment industry. “Being a person of colour, we’re not unitary, we’re not one thing. We should be more specific about making sure we’re representing different groups of people. “I would love to see more crew who are black and brown. That’s really important. We should be careful about just sort of window dressing.”