‘I belong in every room I’m in’: The Bridgerton creator on what drives her self-belief

I have interviewed stars more famous than Shonda Rhimes. I have never, however, been asked by so many female friends to tell one that they love her. The television Rhimes writes creates an intimacy with viewers so intensely personal that when we first meet, I feel – like my friends – as if I already know her. Rhimes’ body language quickly makes it clear that she would rather we didn’t.

Shonda Rhimes: “”People often say they feel like they’re an imposter, and someone’s going to find them out. But it doesn’t make sense to me.”Credit: Sane Seven/The Sunday Times Magazine/News Licensing

Although perfectly warm and friendly, she radiates surprisingly guarded reserve. The TV mogul has always said she writes shows about the sort of strong, smart, powerful women she knows. “People often say they feel like they’re an imposter, and someone’s going to find them out,” she says. “But it doesn’t make sense to me. I belong in every room I’m in. If I got in the room then I belong in that room. I am there, aren’t I?” So her air of stiff wariness is at first puzzling. When its reason emerges, it is horribly sobering.

We’re talking in the New York HQ of her production company, Shondaland, which has made many of the most successful shows of the past two decades. Her medical drama, Grey’s Anatomy, is now on its 20th season; its spin-off, Private Practice, ran for six; Scandal, about an affair between a white president and an African-American crisis manager played by Kerry Washington, ran for seven seasons from 2012 to 2018 and won 35 awards.

In 2017, she joined Netflix for a reported $US150 million in a deal to, as the streaming bosses told her, “just make the shows you want to make”. They weren’t expecting her first idea to be a Regency period drama. “I don’t think they understood what we were doing, but they were excited because I was excited.” A dazzlingly expensive show about the love affairs and power struggles of a multiracial group of aristocrats in 19th-century London was an ambitious proposition, but Bridgerton smashed Netflix’s record in 2020 for its most watched English-language show.

Two years later, season two broke Bridgerton’s own record, and season three has just released. Rhimes’ portrayal of Queen Charlotte as a woman of colour incurred some accusations of erasing Britain’s history of racism, but she doesn’t care. “We’re not trying to tell a history lesson. It’s entertainment.”

One American academic objected that the queen “benefited from the expansion of slavery and from the Empire, and so to rehabilitate her into a more sympathetic historical figure, I think it’s deeply problematic.” When I quote her, Rhimes looks politely uninterested. “I mean, obviously racism is a fact. But racism really involves how white people think about people of colour — and I’m not a white person. I’m interested in thinking about people of colour as multidimensional, very interesting, many-layered people. I’m not writing anything from the point of view of a white person on the outside looking in. That’s not who I am.”

“I’m interested in thinking about people of colour as multidimensional, very interesting, many-layered people.”

SHONDA RHIMES

The 54-year-old grew up in an atypically multiracial suburb of Chicago with white, black, Indian and Jewish neighbours. “That was definitely not the norm but I didn’t know that then.” The youngest of six children to highly successful academic parents, “it was already an established fact when I came into the world that in our household we were smart, we were outspoken, so it never occurred to me that we didn’t have power”.

I ask what happened when she encountered evidence – on the street, on the bus, in shops – that white people didn’t necessarily see black women that way. She begins to smile. “It felt like, ‘Oh my God, these other people don’t know. Did you notice that? They don’t actually know.’ That’s what it felt like. I was raised to never be interested in what other people believed I could do, so their opinions didn’t really matter at all. If they feel they want to be racist, that’s their problem. My job is to move around that.”

When her school counsellor told her not to bother applying to Ivy League universities, she called her mother, who was there within 10 minutes. “She said, ‘Honey, sit right down in the lobby.’ Ten minutes later she came out of the office, had her coat on, her purse ready, and said, ‘You can go to any college you want.’ ”

Having spent her childhood reading books rather than watching TV, her original ambition was to write novels. After graduating in English from Dartmouth, the prestigious Ivy League college in New Hampshire, she decided she “couldn’t be Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison because Toni Morrison already had that job”. After hearing that the University of Southern California’s film school was apparently harder to get into than Harvard Law School, that was where she went next — only to then find herself an unemployed scriptwriter in Hollywood.

Luke Newton as Colin Bridgerton, Nicola Coughlan as Penelope Featherington in season three of Bridgerton.

In 2001 she wrote Crossroads, Britney Spears’ debut film – but after 9/11 she “made a list of all the things I wanted to do, and at the top was adopt a baby”. Nine months and two days later, aged 32, she brought home her oldest daughter, Harper, now 21, whom she raised as a single mother. Confined at home with the baby, Rhimes fell in love with television and wrote Grey’s Anatomy.

About 20 million Americans watched season one in 2005. By season two the following year, one episode drew more than 37 million. The show has been a primetime weekly fixture for half of every year since then, making Rhimes the Oprah Winfrey of television drama. Her fan base only grew with Scandal, and in interviews a decade ago she spoke about how much she loved engaging with fans online. But in 2015 she stood down as Grey’s Anatomy’s showrunner, and by last year was almost entirely off social media. What changed?

“Social media changed. Fans have passionate feelings, and I was always fine with that. I understand that the characters felt like their friends. They were my imaginary friends too. That’s why I was writing them. And I think people just had very strong feelings about what happened with their friends.” She pauses. “But then it became weird.”

“Social media changed. Fans have passionate feelings, and I was always fine with that. But then it became weird.”

SHONDA RHIMES

After each season finale of Grey’s Anatomy she had to have a police car parked outside her house for a week, due to death threats from fans unhappy with how she had ended that series. “They got mean. And you never knew who was going to really take offence in the wrong way.” She had to employ private 24-hour security at her house in LA, not because fans were endlessly bothering her for selfies. “No, it was because people are dangerous and strange.”

In 2012, she had adopted a second daughter, and had a third the following year by a surrogate. “I wanted to just be able to walk out my front door and hang out with my kids and not be worried. I would lay awake at night with stress.” She stopped reading anything on social media, but fear for her security haunted her every minute and “affected a lot of things. And I had some very helpful friends who’d had similar experiences, who were able to give me a lot of perspective, and who were adamant that if you can’t live normally then you’re not going to be able to live.” In 2020 she left LA and moved her family to a state she won’t even name.

Rhimes’ whole life used to be about work. A single minute not spent working, she once said, felt like “wasting time”, but when I remind her of this she laughs. “I’m not like that any more, luckily. The pandemic changed everything. When I stopped going into the office I realised I’d been working so hard that I didn’t even realise how exhausted I was. I was so tired.”

Bridgerton hadn’t yet come out and she felt tyrannised by “the expectations of other people of what we were supposed to do for Netflix. And then I was, like, I’m supposed to be having fun! The whole reason I came to Netflix was because ‘this is going to be fun’.”

Presented with unfamiliar free time by the pandemic, she says, sounding faintly embarrassed, “that translated into me having, like, hobbies. Which is fascinating to me because, honestly, in the old days the only hobby I could have named was sleeping. Not now.” Looking even more bashful, “I took up golf.”

When she adds that she has also taken up baking, I can’t keep a straight face. “I know!” Rhimes chuckles. “And I literally said the other day, I think I should start to learn how to make jam.”

Bridgerton and its spin-off series, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, are both filmed in England. “But here’s the beauty,” she says happily. “I don’t actually need to be on a set for the set to run. So I visit from time to time.” Although now able to prioritise her younger daughters, Emerson Pearl, 12, and Beckett, 10, “My theory of parenting is that I’m trying to raise a citizen. I’m not trying to raise a friend. I’m not trying to raise a kid that I’m going to keep forever.”

She hasn’t allowed them phones or social media, but doesn’t need a television policy because “they’re not even interested. They don’t watch it.” When she can get them to watch with her, she usually ends up annoying them by predicting every plotline. “They’re, like, Mom, can you please stop talking?”

She has a theory to explain the global blockbuster appeal of Bridgerton. “I think there’s this desire for something simpler, where there are rules to courting. We just said, how do you meet somebody? Well, back then you met somebody because you went to these balls, your parents talked and you had a dance. People seem to love that sort of order to a world, where the rules of love are so clear. There were rules of interaction, like a map, and that doesn’t exist any more. There are no rules of engagement now in anything.”

Bridgerton is the ultimate antidote to Tinder? “Exactly.”

Season three of Bridgerton is streaming on Netflix now.

The Sunday Times, UK

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