Actor Dionne Brown is about to set screens alight as the titular Queenie in Channel 4’s eight-part adaptation of Candice Carty-Williams’s bestselling novel.
“We’re all Queenie, a little bit,” says actor Dionne Brown, 28, who is about to set screens alight as the titular every woman in Channel 4’s eight-part adaptation of Candice Carty-Williams’s bestselling novel. Equal parts gloriously messy, hysterically funny and painfully relatable, Queenie – a journalist in the throes of a quarter-life crisis – wasn’t just a dream role for the Londoner, but a revelatory one too.
“Before I read the book, I didn’t realise that other Black women felt this way,” says Brown in an east London studio post-Vogue shoot, her form-fitting tonal look swapped for black jeans and a dark shirt. (Usually, Brown admits, she is one for an “oversized fit”, but this made her feel “both feminine and masculine, which got me out of a certain comfort zone”.) “It has to do with how we process our grief and fear: we internalise it. It made me feel better about everything bad that’s ever happened to me.”
Brown says she screamed when she found out she got the job – her first lead – but also felt the pressure to do justice to “something that had such a massive impact on so many people”. The other big challenge she faced? Filming a number of awkward sex scenes. “I didn’t kiss any boys in drama school,” she admits, “and then I kissed four in a short space of time. It’s a lot.”
It’s not quite the future she envisioned: her mother is a reverend and provided “quite a religious upbringing”, though Brown always had a knack for performing, taking ballet, violin and piano lessons from a young age. Acting classes followed, as well as a stint at ArtsEd, after which she appeared in ITV’s The Walk-In, then starred opposite Peter Capaldi in Apple TV+’s Criminal Record.
Once the latter was released, “I was getting stared at on public transport and I’m like, ‘Is it because I’m pretty or because people are watching my show?’” She’s wary of fame, her social media accounts are private and she wants to stay “on the ‘low low’ – but whatever comes will come… as long as no one forgets about the art”.
Original article can be found on British Vogue
