Adjoa Andoh: swinging the lens

June Givanni: Your character Lady Danbury is central to both Bridgerton [2020-] and the Queen Charlotte [2023] historical drama series. How culturally significant was it to have these come out of the Shondaland development stable?

Adjoa Andoh: I don’t think there would have been that interest in ‘swinging the lens’ on the narrative in this way without someone like Shonda Rhimes [the creator of Grey’s Anatomy, 2005-; and Scandal, 2012-18]. She’s got a dramatic instinct that’s curious to look at narratives in a fresh way.

Can you explain ‘swinging the lens’?

In film terms, when you swing a lens, you change the camera lens because you want to have a slightly different perspective on whatever it is you’re shooting. My production company is called Swinging the Lens because I want to literally imagine you’re looking at something through a camera lens and then you swing it to somewhere else. I’m interested in [figuratively] swinging the lens on stories and the way we light them, dress them, locate and imagine them. So either we tell other people’s stories, or we look at the same story through a different lens. It’s what Shonda did when she read the Bridgerton novels, because there’s no mention of race in any of them. She swung the lens of her eye on those books and went, “This is interesting. What if we told this Regency story, and we added in the head of the ton [high society in the era] who is the Queen; and added the fact that many historians believe Queen Charlotte had African heritage? What does that do to the story when we broaden the roll-call of characters and viewers?” While it’s been an overwhelming success, some people are still pushing back hard against that.

In what way?

Well, It’s very hard for people if they think the world is shaped in a certain way, to cope with coming to understand there may be more nuance and complexity in that shape. Stories tell us who we are in time and space. They tell us the value society accords us, and they tell us how we are expected to flow through the world. People of all races have always been in this country. The ‘great’ in Great Britain has a lot to do with this nation’s overseas adventurism and the benefits Britain acquired from the rest of the world, not least in terms of free labour, culture and raw materials. All of those things contributed to making Britain great and in the Regency era, Britain was in its pomp. Go to America or the West Indies and look historically at all those places: Virginia, Georgetown or Charlottesville.

I was born in Georgetown, Guyana.

Exactly! The George and the Charlotte they’re talking about are our George and Charlotte. Look at the delicious irony of that.

Charlotte came to Great Britain and brought the Christmas tree; not Albert. She brought that European tradition from her home in Germany. At the same time, here was a woman who was complained about for having “ugly thick lips”, “an ugly wide nose” and “a mulatto complexion” – features that were powdered down for portraits. Having all these places in the world that were oppressive to people of African heritage named after her speaks to life’s complexity. 

When you start destabilising the history like that, it’s hard for people. Some people may say, “This is woke history gone mad.” I’d say, “History is great! It’s the story of us all – so lets learn all of it.” But our show is an entertainment, it’s not a documentary. The Featheringtons are not wearing Regency colours – there is no psychedelic orange in a Regency colour palette, but theirs is a Regency cut. So drama has scope to play with form and say things in different ways. I would say the great cultural shift for me has been that people of colour for the first time see themselves in a historical romantic drama, where they are engaged in the central narratives of the story, and this audience can be entertained by it. That’s not to say there aren’t other stories to tell from this period about people of colour, but we are many stories and the breadth is important.

Indeed. You mentioned your company earlier – please tell me about its role and ambition?

I set it up with my friend Juanne Fuller, who’s also my publicist. I named the company Swinging the Lens because I wanted to be playful. As I mentioned, swinging a lens changes perspective. But it also sounds like ‘swinging the lead’ – a colloquialism meaning bunking off! As an actor I am conscious of how I have bunked off from a regular work life and how lucky I am to have a working life based around play. I also wanted the company’s purpose to lead in its name – to tell the stories that are on the roads less trodden, narratively, the outlier or less viewed stories. The feature film we have in development at the moment, The Painter’s Friend, based on the novel by Howard Cunnell, is about class, art, grief and dispossession. That covers a lot of people. It covers poverty, care-leavers, refugees, mental health, a lot of lives not generally in the centre of narratives; and it’s funny and tender because all our stories contain complexity and richness.

As you’ve been speaking, I’ve felt something resonate back to Jesse, the rebellious character you played in Frances-Anne Solomon’s What my Mother Told Me [1995 ], who came with a different perspective to her role and place in a powerful family.

Well, Frances-Anne was born to be a powerhouse. She was a beacon as a woman of colour director, producer, writer, coming out of BBC radio and TV drama where she was hugely impactful. What was interesting creatively in this film was that I played both the mother and the daughter. For us, the daughter was a collaborated version of Frances-Anne and me. It was her story imagined in a different way. And yet the elements of a young person trying to find their voice, or a mother trapped in a barren destructive marriage – these are universal stories.

It was great to see Adjoa the young actor in her early twenties in that film. What about working with another of my favourite people, the great Jamaican actress Leonie Forbes?

Miss Leonie was the gift of that job for me. I played the young mother in the past and she played that same mother in the present. I remember we had a scene on a boat and Miss Leonie was frightened of being on the water, so I sang ‘Moon River’ to her to distract her. When I hear that lovely song, I always think of Miss Leonie and this film. I loved how skilful she was, how wise, how absolutely electric she is on camera. I felt very honoured to work with her. But I also felt frustrated because Miss Leonie should have been an international superstar, with such skills and insights on theatre and on screen, and a hugely significant actor in broadcasting and radio – everything!

There were a lot of Black artists coming through theatre, TV and film at that time, who never received the recognition they deserved. But you have to be in the space on a regular basis and that demands the writing of a variety of stories that have a narrative that’s interesting and meaningful. That’s why, in our era, Spike Lee just blew everyone’s minds with his work 
I love the fact that there are certain [trademark] Spike Lee shots, eg, the one where he put someone on the other end of the dolly and then he travels the dolly. I love his cinematography. I love the way he would light Black skin. That you have a range of colours. The humour. 

I loved Bill Lee’s scores. There’s a musical language to his stuff. Then when Wynton Marsalis came on; Stevie Wonder came on… Malcolm X [1992] is one of my all-time favourite films. Denzel should have got his Best Actor Oscar for that, not for playing a violent criminal Black man [in Training Day, 2001].

Malcolm X is a work of absolute beauty and genius. Everything about that film is lovely. It was so epic and so playful! I do feel that Spike Lee has not been given all the flowers over the years, over the decades. If he was angry then, I can’t imagine what he’s feeling now. Did his bravura get punished?