“This is not a docuseries,” the showrunner quips.
Shonda Rhimes knows a thing or two about making history.
From her Emmy wins to her Netflix deal, she’s blazed many a trail. But now she’s making history in a different way, by quite literally rewriting it in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. The new Netflix series, a prequel to Bridgerton, tells the story of Queen Charlotte (India Amarteifio) and her marriage to King George III of England (Corey Mylchreest) — but that’s more a jumping off point than anything else.
“This is not a docuseries,” Rhimes tells EW. “This is fiction based on fact. The queen that we’re telling the history of is Queen Charlotte as we know her in Bridgerton, not Queen Charlotte as she was in England. It was really fun to get to both delve in and out of what was real and then also create what was needed.”
For starters, there is an ongoing historical debate as to Charlotte’s racial background. Queen Charlotte maintains many historians’ belief that Charlotte was a woman of color, which Rhimes was dedicated to depicting from the moment they introduced the character on Bridgerton.
“I always think it’s interesting how desperate people are to prove that someone was not of color,” she says. “That seems to be like a big focus in people’s lives. I don’t understand that, but for me, I really delved into the research in a deep way. We had a wonderful historian working with us, and we got inside of what was going on historical, so that then I could know when I was straying. Then, I could stray on purpose, or I could take one tiny thing I heard from history and turn it into something else.”
For Rhimes, it’s about diverging from the historical record with purpose. One area where they didn’t stray was the sad truth of King George III’s mental illness. He was called the “mad king” by many, and historians have proposed numerous possibilities for what might have afflicted the royal. Rhimes didn’t so much as choose one single diagnosis as combine a range of possibilities.
“History has no idea what George had,” she notes. “They don’t know if it was a mental illness. They don’t know if it was a physical illness. There’s tons of different opinions. I wanted to find a way to portray what was going on with him in the same way the doctors of his era saw it. They don’t know what it is, but I wanted to find a way to portray it and have it feel honest and have Corey feel empowered to portray that character in a way that feels respectful.”
Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story is now streaming on Netflix.
