Leading Lady
With season four of Bridgerton now wrapped, actor Adjoa Andoh discusses what’s next for Lady Danbury, her own creative ambitions and why she’s happy to be best known for her part in the Netflix period piece.
Despite being a star of stage and screen for more than three decades, Adjoa Andoh is perhaps best known for one of her most recent roles – Lady Agatha Danbury in Netflix’s Regency drama Bridgerton. Yet the British actor is relaxed about this apparent case of recency bias that bypasses an extensive body of work across film, television and theatre.
“There is a line from Troilus and Cressida where Ulysses says: ‘The present eye praises the present object,’” she says, quoting the Shakespeare play. “It’s a fantastic speech, which is basically going, ‘Don’t try and live on the laurels of yesterday. Yesterday’s gone. People are interested in today,’ and so goes the world.
“I’ve been doing this for 40 years and so I’ve done a lot of work,” Andoh continues. “Everyone knows I love my Shakespeare.”
She says she was “incredibly proud” to play Condoleezza Rice in the National Theatre production of David Hare’s play Stuff Happens, and “loved” playing Brenda Mazibuko in 2009 feature film Invictus, which dramatises Nelson Mandela’s bid to unite Apartheid-era South Africa through the 1995 Rugby World Cup.
“To work with Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon was dreamy, especially on a project that touched my heart in that way that Nelson Mandela did,” she says. “Last year, I did a great series for Toby Whithouse called The Red King. I loved doing that. It was a really happy job and it was really exciting to do.”
Andoh also has a number of shows in development with her own production company, Swinging the Lens, while the rest of her time is occupied by directing Shakespeare on the stage, teaching at performing arts academy RADA and fulfilling her role as a visiting professor at Oxford University. “There’s a whole range of things that I’m doing in my life at the moment. I’m also in the early stages of writing a book, so there’s lots going on,” she says.
With Bridgerton S4 – the latest chapter of the Shonda Rhimes historical romance drama based on Julia Quinn’s novels – recently completing production and due on Netflix in 2026, Andoh is speaking to DQ from the Italian Global Series Festival, where she was among the guests of honour. But she can’t be moved to reveal anything more about the upcoming storyline beyond the official logline, which reveals the focus of the story shifts to “bohemian” second son Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson). Despite his elder and younger brothers both being happily married, Benedict is loath to settle down – until he meets a captivating Lady in Silver, Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha), at his mother’s masquerade ball.
New cast members for S4 include Katie Leung as Lady Araminta Gun, Michelle Mao as Rosamund Li and Isabella Wei as Posy Li. The returning cast features Jonathan Bailey (Anthony Bridgerton), Victor Alli (Lord John Stirling), Julie Andrews (Lady Whistledown), Lorraine Ashbourne (Mrs Varley), Nicola Coughlan (Penelope Bridgerton), Ruth Gemmell (Violet Bridgerton), Claudia Jessie (Eloise Bridgerton), Luke Newton (Colin Bridgerton), Golda Rosheuvel (Queen Charlotte), Polly Walker (Portia Featherington) and Andoh as Lady Danbury, one of the most powerful figures in London high society.
“It’s about Benedict and what happens to him. I suppose the word I would use for S4 is ‘mystery.’ There’s a mystery about it that’s rather beautiful,” Andoh says. “It’s a very beautiful season. I think people will be suitably pleased with it. It’ll have all the usual flavours, but there’s a bit of extra fabulousness to it this season.”
Since its debut in 2020, Bridgerton has established a familiar format, with each season’s gaze falling on a central couple among the show’s large ensemble of characters. But while viewers have come to look forward to how those relationships will play out, the changing personalities and tones in each season mean the series is constantly evolving.
“Things that don’t shift and change stand still and die. Good drama is always getting richer and richer,” Andoh says. “The audience knows more and more of the back history of what they’re watching. Even if it’s things like seeing children in S1 who now look like young adults, you’re seeing those shifts and changes and you’re getting to know more about the characters and more about their relationships. You watch it in a different way, as much as anything.”
Bridgerton S4 actually marks Andoh’s fifth entry in the Bridgerton world, following Lady Danbury’s appearance in prequel series Queen Charlotte. Each season, the actor has been able to develop her character further, and if she wants to bring her own ideas to the show’s writing team, “those conversations are available,” she says.
“It doesn’t mean your ideas will be taken up, by any stretch of the imagination. But the conversations are always there, and confident storytellers like Shonda are open to ideas. If you think those ideas might enrich your project, you’ll take that on board. People who are less confident hold tightly to, ‘This is the line and it’s only ever going to be this and nothing is ever going to change.’ People who have curiosity and creativity, their minds are always open.”
As the executive producer of Bridgerton through her Shondaland production company, Rhimes is across every aspect of the series in partnership with showrunners Chris Van Dusen, who created the series and ran the first two seasons, and Jess Brownell (S3&4).
“Shonda’s always the connective tissue,” Andoh says. “If your name’s above the door, you wanna know what’s going through the door. Shonda will always have the final say on everything, and quite right too. It’s called Shondaland. But within that, Chris was an amazing showrunner to get the whole Bridgerton world started. He’d worked with Shonda for many years, so he knew the language, the flavour and the taste of the company. And Jess has been with Shondaland for a long time as well. The baton was passed to her and she’s obviously going to bring her own sensibility to it, but she is also working within a frame that she knows and is familiar with.”
In particular, Andoh points to the addition of Queen Charlotte to the series as a signal of how Rhimes likes to interrogate stories and introduce new ideas and characters to the show’s source material. While Bridgerton’s story and most of its characters are fictional, Queen Charlotte is based on the real historical figure of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
“If you read the books, there is no Queen Charlotte. So Shonda puts her Queen Charlotte in, and the history of Charlotte and George,” Andoh says. “Some historians picked up on the fact that when Charlotte came to Great Britain, there were complaints about her ‘ugly, thick lips’ and her ‘ugly nose’ and her ‘mulatto’ skin. What’s that about? Then you start investigating that history and you start seeing the history that goes back to the 1400s and trading between the Kingdom of Benin in West Africa and Portugal, and then across the whole of Europe. You start to see there were elements of different races coming together throughout the continent and throughout the royal families of those continents as well.
“To follow that through and go, ‘OK, well, what if we made Queen Charlotte look like the woman that people complained about when she came to Britain?’… She [Rhimes] did that.”
The show’s diverse casting goes further, reflecting what London really looked like in the 1800s. “We know in the area of St Giles, there were up to 20,000 people of African heritage in central London in that period,” Andoh says. “Then you start to think, ‘Well, the empire was enormous. Britain went to places across the world and places across the world came to Britain’ – and you can see that reflected in our show.
“It’s not a documentary, it’s a drama and it’s entertainment. So Shonda takes some of those interesting facts and then she sticks bells on them and psychedelic colours and a bit of a quintet playing Madonna and a lot of sex, and there you have Britain.”
According to Andoh, Queen Charlotte, which charted the young queen’s marriage to King George of England, will not be returning. “I can shed the light that there is no future Queen Charlotte season two. It was a standalone miniseries of its own, and that’s the end of that,” she says.
Andoh won’t be short of work, however. Away from the world of Bridgerton, her company Swinging the Lens is developing multiple projects, continuing a passion of Andoh’s that began with a theatre company in the early 1990s.
“We were doing restoration comedies and plays written by female wits. We commissioned new plays, we did stuff with [prolific playwright and director] Alan Ayckbourn. We worked out of Bristol Old Vic. We toured shows, we took stuff to Norway. We were doing coproductions,” she says. Notably, Andoh co-directed and acted in what was the Globe Theatre’s first Shakespeare production to feature an all-women-of-colour cast – a retelling of Richard II in 2019.
“So I’ve always been making work. I’ve coproduced films in the Caribbean before now as well. So this is just a continuation of that. Swinging the Lens came about because I just wanted to make more work.”
The company has a feature film, The Painter’s Friend, in development with Strike star Tom Burke, based on the novel by Andoh’s husband Howard Connell. There is also a crime series with a terrestrial broadcaster that is going “great guns,” with episodes being written.
“It’s a lovely other place to put energy and to get excited about telling stories in a way that floats my boat,” Andoh says.
Like Bridgerton? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
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