Bridgerton Star Charithra Chandran on Becoming The New Season's Diamond
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She is called the picture of grace, beauty, and charm—chosen by the queen as the “diamond of the season.” In the elaborate and deliriously soapy mating ritual that is Bridgerton, Edwina Sharma is the town’s most coveted jewel.
“It's such an awkward position to be in, right?” says Charithra Chandran, who steps into the leading role of the hit series’ second season, now streaming on Netflix. “When it’s like, ‘You’re the most beautiful girl in the—’ and I'm like, ‘Oh, God, that's just not true.”
The 25-year-old Londoner, an Oxford graduate who started performing at a young age, is being modest. (She also gracefully credits the series’ top-notch makeup and hair stylists.) But Chandran recognizes the significance of playing a heroine whose dark skin doesn’t raise an eyebrow in a story of Regency-era courtship.
“It's quietly revolutionary that we just exist—we have joy, and love, and romance—and our skin color only adds to that beauty,” Chandran says. “You see us in all our glory, and our culture is an important part of us, but it's not the only thing that defines us.”
Bridgerton’s second season introduces the Sharma family, Mary (Shelley Conn) and her daughters Edwina and Kate (Simone Ashley), who’ve returned from a kind of social exile in their native India to play the London marriage market. Where Edwina is impeccably sweet and well-mannered, Kate has a polished toughness, all the better to guide and protect her younger sister. As sparks secretly fly between Kate and Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey), high society’s roguish but most eligible bachelor, and he officially courts Edwina, the sisters waltz their way through the season’s central love triangle.
While Chandran was a fan of period romance growing up (obviously, BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice adaptation was a particular favorite), she always held such stories at arm’s length. “Because I thought, ‘Okay, well, I'm never going to get the chance to do that,’” she recalls. “I don't even think I was upset about it, because it was just such a fact.”
Now, Chandran is poised to break out with the kind of performance she never got to see. “I faced a lot of colorism growing up, like so many brown girls do,” she says. If girls like her can watch Bridgerton and see the Sharma sisters—and themselves—as “bloody gorgeous,” well, “I think that's one of the best things that can come out of this,” Chandran says.
Born in the U.K. to parents from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Chandran was enrolled in private drama lessons from the age of 5 or 6, and started acting with local theater troops while in school. “I’ve always been a performer in that it never felt like a choice I made,” says Chandran, who credits her parents, both of whom work in medicine, for encouraging her interests from an early age. “They didn't have any support systems when they moved here, and what they crave for me is stability and security,” Chandran says, not necessarily qualities that show business is known for.
But if pursuing an acting career is a leap of faith, it’s one Chandran says she took with nothing to lose. After completing her degree at Oxford University in philosophy, politics and economics, she decided to take a year off before starting the corporate job she already had lined up. Six months later came March 2020.
During the early months of the pandemic, Chandran busied herself volunteering in her local community, helping to set up a food bank and delivering groceries and medications to neighbors in need. She also took stock of her own priorities. “It was a moment when life stood still for many people, and we could really reflect on what we wanted and what our purpose was,” Chandran recalls. “It was through that self reflection that I thought, ‘It’s now or never—I have to go for it.’”
So she put together a reel from her work in student films and cold-emailed industry brass. Miraculously, she says, some of them replied and she signed with an agent. An audition for Bridgerton came just months later, before season one premiered in December 2020 and the series became a global phenomenon. During the lengthy audition process, Chandran filmed the spy thriller series Alex Rider before learning she landed the part of Edwina.
“I can't help but think a lot of luck was involved,” she says of her career’s rapid takeoff. “Obviously I worked hard, but it would be ridiculous of me to not acknowledge that.” As for a backup plan, Chandran still has until the end of the year to decide if she’ll take that office job.
Bridgerton’s second season is both a coming of age for Edwina, and a love story between the Sharma sisters, whose bond is tested by their encounters with the dreamy (and often waterlogged) Viscount. “Edwina starts off as this naive, fairly submissive girl who believes that her sister knows more about what's better for her,” Chandran says.
As the season goes on, and, of course, more scandal-threatening secrets are revealed, Edwina comes into her own—and Chandran along with her.
“There's an innocence to Charithra, but at the same time she has this very smart, shrewd, almost cutting side to her as well,” says Bridgerton creator and showrunner Chris Van Dusen, who notes that the series aims to furnish Edwina with more inner life than the character has in Julia Quinn’s series of novels. “Edwina would have felt more one-dimensional in less capable hands,” Van Dusen says.
“There's a hope and optimism to her,” Chandran says of Edwina, over whom the actor admits she’s extremely protective. “You see that this is actually the beginning of her story.” (Whether Chandran and the Sharmas will return to Bridgerton, which has been renewed for third and fourth seasons, remains to be seen.)
As for where we may see Chandran next, the actor is tight-lipped and aims to stay grounded in the present. “For the first time in my life, I'm just trying to appreciate and enjoy the here and now,” Chandran says, rather than restlessly focusing on what’s next. (That said, Chandran is an ardent Succession fan: “Shout out Jesse Armstrong: I'll do it for free. My agent is going to kill me for saying that.”)
In the meantime, she’s enjoying life as a London twenty-something whose social life is more movie nights and comedy clubs with friends than Bridgerton-esque dance cards and pall-mall. And she’s taking in the response to her breakthrough role from the audience that perhaps matters most.
“When you see the comments from young brown girls, it makes you think, ‘Well, this is everything,’” Chandran says. “Any doubt that I had in my brain, any pressure I might feel, that makes it worth it.”
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