The new Hulu series Queenie, adapted from the eponymous book written by Candice Carty-Williams, who also serves as showrunner on the Onyx Collective project, sends a message to women of all ages and from all walks of life: It’s OK to start over.
To move forward, one must face the past head-on. Queenie Jenkins has found herself picking up the pieces after a messy breakup with her long-term boyfriend, but she must uncover things before she can come out on the other side. Can she do it?
“We’re meeting her at the top, she’s at the top of the roller coaster,” Dionne Brown said of her character, Queenie, in an interview with Blavity’s Shadow and Act. “And throughout, we see her going down. At the end, she’s at the top again.”
She said the biggest takeaway from portraying the 25-year-old Jamaican British woman straddling two cultures while living in south London is that “bad choices make good stories.”
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“I hope that women, specifically Black women, can watch Queenie and feel like it’s OK to be undone sometimes,” Bellah, who plays Queenie’s right-hand woman and rock, Kyazike, in the series, added. “It’s OK to sit in it because it will get better. It’s going to work itself out, however it works itself out. I hope they feel like they can reach out to people in their community a bit more and feel like they can talk to their friends a little bit more. But, it’s OK to not be OK.”
For Brown, it’s all about helping viewers see themselves more clearly, especially when immersed in cloudy situations.
“I hope we see ourselves just a bit more human and a bit,” she said. “We humanize ourselves in that regard. We are people. I know that there’s a lot of emphasis on the facts of Black women being strong or, you know, just having to hold or carry a lot of trauma. But I hope that watching the show just gives everybody a sense of a slight sense of catharsis as it did for me when I read the book.”
Brown found her way to Carty-Williams’ book during the audition process for the role and continued to read it once she had been cast.
“Books are so descriptive, and they’re so weighty that we can’t fit everything in,” she shared when reflecting on whether there’s anything that she was sad to see not make it to the television adaptation of the body of work. “There’s probably a few things cut that I was sad to see go. There’s one episode that cut where Queenie’s cursing someone a little bit, and it made me really happy because there are a few people that could use the curse in the book and in the show. That’s the only thing I wish she’d do… just tell somebody about themselves.”
Queenie is now streaming on Hulu.
