“We’re all Queenie, a little bit,” says actor Dionne Brown, 28, who is about to set screens alight as the titular everywoman in Hulu’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 realize that other Black women felt this way,” says Brown in an east London studio. “It has to do with how we process our grief and fear: we internalize 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 role—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 in London, after which she appeared in ITV’s The Walk-In, then starred opposite Peter Capaldi in Apple TV+’s Criminal Record.
