“I always wanted to kind of make something like that,” Queenie author and series showrunner/writer/executive producer Candice Carty-Williams said about Bridget Jones’s Diary, which served as a source of inspiration for her story about a young Jamaican British woman trying to find her place in the world. “I thought it was important to nod to something that really inspired me. Of course, Helen Fielding is a white woman, and Bridget Jones, Renee Zellweger, white women… But these facets of womanhood, they’re universal across race.” Candice Carty-Williams joined a TCA press conference for the series adaptation of Queenie, and while comparisons to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary can be made, it’s far from the same story. “I’m doing my own thing.”
(Disney/PictureGroup)
Starring as Queenie is Dionne Brown, who talked about how her own background felt at home in the title character. “I’m also Caribbean, and I come from a big family where a lot of girls have only got one brother,” Dionne revealed. “Queenie’s sitting into what it was like to have that much feminine energy around her all the time in terms of Aunty Maggie and grandma and Diana and Kyazike and Darcy and Cassandra. I know that, obviously, she’s not related to her friends, but there is a lot of strong, feminine energy around her, if not strong matriarchal energy around her all of the time. So, for me, it did feel like coming home a little bit. A lot, actually. The culture’s so rich, and I love being Caribbean… This is exactly how I grew up and this is exactly what it felt like and what it smelled like and what it looked like. I feel like it helped me sit into the character a lot more and just proudly represent where it is that we’re coming from.”
“It’s amazing to have stories where Black women don’t have it all together, where they don’t have to appear strong and figured out and clued up,” added Bella, who plays Queenie’s best friend Kyazike. Viewers may perceive Kyazike as an enabler, but Bellah defended her character’s choices. “As women, we need that one friend that’s going to be like, ‘Oh, you robbed a bank? That’s fine, you needed money.’ Do you know what I mean? And need a friend that’s going to make excuses for you so you don’t feel crazy all the time. But I do feel like there are certain decisions that Queenie made that she didn’t report back to Kyazike immediately. And if she did, Kyazike would have checked her very incredibly.”
“It was really important to me to be involved from the beginning to the end,” concluded Candice Carty-Williams about the decision to adapt her own novel and serve as showrunner on the series. “I’m incredibly exacting as a person and a writer, and so every single decision, I had to be across it. I am very controlling, but I also enjoy what I do, and I wanted to make sure that the story was authentic and also that the cast and crew had an amazing time making it.”
All eight episodes of Queenie are now streaming on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ in select territories.