Candice Carty-Williams borrowed “Bridget Jones’s Diary” from her aunt’s bookshelf “when I was too young.”
She saw the film versions when she was older and realized she, too, wanted to make something similar.
The rub? Bridget Jones is white; Renee Zellweger is white, Candice Carty-Williams is not.
“But that’s OK,” Carty-Williams says. “These stories — these facets of womanhood — are universal, across race.”
To make her story resonate with others, Carty-Williams wrote about a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in South London. Called “Queenie,” the book was a bestseller, establishing its author and leading to a series set to premiere in June on Hulu.
In the show’s mix: Carty-Williams, who’s not only the creator and executive producer but also the showrunner.
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“It was really important to me to be involved from the beginning to the end,” she says. “I’m incredibly exacting as a person and every single decision I had to be a part of.”
Most important: Authenticity.
To make sure “Queenie” looked like the life she wrote about, Carty-Williams shot the series on location.
“Every single place was a location. Queenie and Tom’s flat – that was one location. Kyazike’s flat, that was another. We really wanted to be true to the location of the book and the world.”
The series allowed her to use voiceovers to bridge gaps, listen in on inner voices and take leaps other forms of storytelling couldn’t.
“It made me nervous,” says Dionne Brown, who plays Queenie. “I’m reacting to dialogue that nobody can hear.”
On the surface, Queenie may look happy, but she’s often revisiting trauma that happened to her.
“I didn’t want to show domestic abuse or anything that was too heavy because I don’t want to see that as a Black woman,” Carty-Williams explains. “It was important for me to use this fragmented way of showing things.” Music also helped.
“We’re seeing what happens when you stuff the drawer and you don’t clear it out,” Brown says. “We’ve all had a conversation with someone and we hear something that wasn’t said. As a talking point now for me, I’m more inclined to be like, ‘Tell me what you’re thinking I said’ when there’s a misunderstanding. (Queenie) absorbs everything and she holds it at her center.”
Growing up, Carty-Williams watched depictions of Black women that were mainly American “and I remember trying to find myself in these depictions," she said. "They were really confident and understood themselves or were in spaces where their Blackness was often celebrated. I didn’t feel that in the U.K., so I was like, ‘Maybe it’s time to write the story of someone who wasn’t that confident.’”
Brown says the shift allowed “Queenie” to celebrate the wins but also show the growth in losses.
“That’s super important,” she says. “It also focuses on what that means in terms of mental health, womanhood, relationships and love and how we perceive it. The whole thing is like one big question mark.”
Surprisingly, when Carty-Williams wanted advice about adapting her book, she didn’t talk to another woman but screenwriter Jesse Armstrong.
“He sat me down and he was like, ‘Make sure you write what you want to write,''' she said. "And I was like, ‘You’re Jesse Armstrong, you can say that to me.’ There aren’t many Black female authors from the U.K. who have done this, so I had to look to a white man for help.”
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"Queenie" premieres Friday, June 7, on Hulu.
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