Above a fishmonger in Electric Lane, a storey-high mural of Dionne Brown currently gazes enigmatically down at passers-by. Her image may not yet be well known to anyone beyond the Brixton locals who pass it, but that is about to change with the arrival of Queenie on Channel 4 — in which she has the starring role.
“I didn’t anticipate it would be as big as it was,” the 28-year old says, showing me a picture on her phone of the painting put up to publicise the show. “There’s nothing else. It’s just me. But I’m like, ‘Don’t take it down!’”
Queenie is one of the most anticipated shows of the summer. It is based on the 2019 novel by Candice Carty-Williams, which became a Sunday Times bestseller and won Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, as well as being praised by luminaries from Bernadine Evaristo to Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City.
We meet at a café in Fitzrovia, and though tired after a gruelling round of press duties, Brown is warm and friendly and keen to chat. She plays 25-year-old Queenie Jenkins, a British-Jamaican woman trying to navigate her life in London. After a bad break-up, she spirals into what she calls a “quarter-life crisis” self-medicating with alcohol and casual sex.
“I just remember what it was like, being younger and being frustrated,” she says. “My best friend and I, we have this thing, where we’re like, ‘18 to 25, they’re dickhead ages.’” She can relate to Queenie’s quarter-life crisis. “There was a massive turn at like 26 where I was like, ‘Oh, I feel better.’ Before then, it was just the war. And there were definitely fun moments, but my quarter-life [crisis], I think I’ve had it.”
Carty-Williams has dubbed the book the “Black Bridget Jones”, but Brown is keen to stress that it speaks to a wider audience. “It did a lot for a lot of people,” she says. “It’s not relegating experience to only black people.”
That said, the racist microaggressions Queenie faces in her daily life are very much part of the book and show. “Someone tweeted me and said, ‘You have #BlackLivesMatter in the acknowledgements. It’s like you knew’,” Carty-Williams told me on a visit to the set in October: the book came out in 2019, before the Black Lives Matter movement exploded a year later.
“I was like, it’s been happening for years. I think that all the things I was talking about and all the things I was seeing, more people can see them now, basically. I don’t think things are better, but I think people are able to talk about things now.” Then there’s the sex.
Carty-Williams has described the book as “quite dark,” and that’s addressed in the show too, with some scenes involving rough sex, although it was toned down. Brown had four scene partners and an intimacy co-ordinator, which was a new experience for her.
This involved going through the scenes, move by move. “Here, you’re getting spanked. You’re not actually going to be assaulted,” the co-ordinator, Adelaide Waldrop, told her at one point, to Brown’s surprise.
“I thought it was a day where I was just going to be getting hit. In my head it was like, ‘I’m going to have to do it.’”
Plus, Carty-Williams was on hand. “She’d be as far away from me as you are now,” Brown says, gesturing to the metre gap between us. “The other day, she was like, ‘I had a really hard time watching those, it was making me cry.’”
It proved a safe space, so much so she could have a laugh. A couple of times Joe Ollman, who plays Guy, had to flip her onto her front during a sex scene. After that, “makeup would come up to touch up my fake eyelashes, and be like, ‘Where are the eyelashes?’… He’d been flipping me into the mattress so hard they’d gone.”
Though Brown is something of a celebrity in Brixton now, which is where her character lives, and grew up near Hornsey, one of five siblings, she rarely ventured south of the river. “It was weird, because we knew of it, because of the market, because of the culture,” she says. “You know what Brixton is, it’s like the Jamaica of London. In a good way.”
Just like Queenie, though, religion played a part in her upbringing: her mother was a Reverend. Initially, Brown started off as a dancer, but “I stopped dancing for two years… because we couldn’t afford it. Working class. And then my mum sent me to acting classes.”
From there, she studied drama at school and attended Open Door, which supports people from working-class backgrounds to get into acting. “I feel like when you’re working class, you have to be aware of like your scarcity mindset. The mindset of being like, ‘Oh, I don’t have enough. I’m not enough. I’m not supposed to be here because there’s some teacher who’s reminding you that drama school was a privilege of the upper class.’”
After graduating from ArtsEd she landed a small role in ITV’s The Walk In, with Stephen Graham, and then Apple TV+’s thriller Criminal Record. Then she landed Queenie after a lengthy audition process and it will likely send her star soaring. One critic has called her performance a “brilliant, sustained and very moving rendition”.
There are downsides, of course. “I’d always wanted someone who was relatively unknown to play Queenie,” Carty-Williams had jokingly told me. “And I feel sad for Dionne because I think that for the rest of her life, people will be like, ‘That’s Queenie!’ — do you know what I mean?”
Brown has said the thought does stress her out a little, and encounters have started happening. She recounts a recent trip to Brixton where a woman stopped her as she was walking. “My step is that of a Londoner. I’ve got somewhere to be. And this woman was like, ‘I know you’re not going to walk past me’... she said it quite aggressively as well. And I was like, ‘what have I done?’ And she was like, ‘Queenie… can’t wait until the show comes out!’”
