TV stardom was never the plan for Bridgerton’s latest leading lady. After graduating from Oxford with a first class degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 25-year-old Charithra Chandran, who plays debutante Edwina Sharma in the second series of Netflix’s wildly successful Regency romance, had a high-powered graduate job lined up at a management consultancy firm, after stints working as a parliamentary assistant and at a think tank.
The idea of pursuing an acting career, she says, “was like saying you wanted to be Prime Minister. I thought people would mock it, I had no knowledge of how to enter the industry, so it felt so out of reach.” Growing up in the same city, though, she’d always been “the annoying theatre kid”, appearing as a child performer when West End musicals toured locally, and “committed so much of my time” to it as an undergraduate.
