Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, 26, has always loved Shakespeare. “The language, the poetry, that vitality. It’s so rhythmic,” she says. As a 15-year-old member of the National Youth Theatre, she “used to queue up for £5 standing tickets at The Globe” and later, in 2021, played Othello in a NYT gender-flipped reimagining of the play, set in the ’90s rave era. The following year, she appeared in Macbeth as Lady Macduff, at The Globe itself.
And so when she landed the role of Juliet opposite Tom Holland’s Romeo, in director Jamie Lloyd’s hotly anticipated production of the Shakespeare tragedy, it must have been a pinch-me moment. Before then, she was best known for Jack Whitehall’s TV show Bad Education. But the looming career-high became quickly overshadowed as she and Holland found themselves at the centre of an abhorrent and tiresome culture war, largely played out in the comments sections on various social media sites. Online trolls decried a Black Juliet, while others fiercely opposed the repugnant racist and misogynistic attacks.
“It’s been really difficult,” says Amewudah-Rivers, threading her hands through the sleeves of her baby-blue hoodie until she’s almost hugging herself, in a dressing room backstage at The Duke of York’s Theatre one afternoon a few days after the play’s opening night. More than 800 Black actors, including Lashana Lynch, Lolly Adefope and Wunmi Mosaku, signed an open letter co-created by Enola Holmes actor Susan Wokoma to condemn the “ugly” racist abuse levelled at Amewudah-Rivers that they found “too much to bear”. The attacks have clearly taken a real toll on the actor – I too, as a fellow Black woman in the creative industries, felt heavy (and afterwards furious) that she’d been robbed of the chance to celebrate such an achievement.
Especially since reviews of her performance in her West End debut have been unanimously shining. Write ups of Lloyd’s stripped-back and screen-heavy production say she more than holds her own among the fevered circus of celebrity and social media commentary – the jaw-dropping scene outside the stage door every night is akin to Beatlemania – not to mention Lloyd’s signature frenzied flashing lights, onstage cameramen and techno beats that make your stomach flip. “Beautiful and bold” is how one critic describes her performance; “Another star is born,” says another. However, Amewudah-Rivers is unaware of it all – she’s following her director’s rules and abstaining from reading reviews and staying away from social media.
She explains she’s taken comfort in family, friends, her therapist and the cast, who have bonded during the media storm – especially Freema Agyeman, who plays the Nurse, Juliet’s longtime ally in Verona (“Big up Freema,” smiles Amewudah-Rivers). “The rehearsal period has not been easy,” she says, “but in moments when I feel uprooted I look to them, and they bring me back to myself.”
The newcomer and her costar Tom Holland may, like Romeo and Juliet, have been caught in the cross hairs of warring factions, but they’re tuning out the noise. Holland tells Vogue that “Fran’s ability to let the work do the talking has been a true lesson not just for me, but for our entire company. I can’t tell you how much I admire her strength and resilience.” As a child, Holland starred in the West End as Billy Elliot, but this is entirely “new territory”, he says. “I couldn’t have asked for a better team to show me the ropes,” he adds, crediting Amewudah-Rivers with “elevating” the show.
Hailing from a village near Brighton, Amewudah-Rivers was raised by her Nigerian mother and her Ghanaian father, a DJ who used to take her on long drives just to play records by Quincy Jones, Bill Withers, Earth Wind & Fire and Whitney Houston (“all the classics”). Listening to music while lying on her bedroom floor became a soothing routine. She took up playing the piano at 10 years old, which became a gateway to performance: she joined the National Youth Theatre, where she studied musical directing, composing and acting, before going on to study music at Oxford.
It was there that she first learnt she needed a support network if she was to pursue a career in the arts. She says she felt an intense feeling of isolation. “I was the only Black person in my college and on my degree. And one of the few people of colour interested in the arts,” she says. “I spent a lot of my time feeling like I was alone.” She started a theatre society for students of colour and directed a production of Medea, starring Charithra Chandran of recent Bridgerton fame (“It gave her so much confidence. She’s an incredible actress”), which won an Evening Standard Future Theatre Award for audio design. With the £10,000 prize money, Amewudah-Rivers made a short film reworking the same Greek myth into a story exploring the sacrifices made for migration and assimilation, and the impact of xenophobic rejection.
She believes that it’s “really important” that young people have charitable pathways and supportive networks in order to pursue careers in the arts. The Romeo & Juliet audience, she has noticed, is far younger than it might be for other Shakespeare productions. When she’s on stage, “it’s really wonderful to look out at young people,” she says. “Being young and in love is at the heart of the show. People have come to see Tom, but it’s important that they also see themselves reflected.”
Her passion for representation is why, for her British Vogue portraits, she was keen for the creative team behind it to be all-Black. She continues, “I’m really early on in my career, and I want to make sure that I’m moving with intention and integrity and drown out the negativity. It’s an amazing privilege to be able to connect with other Black creators and to say ‘I see you’, whether you’re doing your thing in hair and make-up, or style, or photography.” In her view, the simple act of telling stories is a way to educate, to start conversation and drive progress. “Our job is to reflect society,” which is why she is “drawn to the power and magic of theatre,” she says. “It’s directness.”
It was famously Toni Morrison who said in one of her lectures that the very serious function of racism is distraction. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” And Amewudah-Rivers is trying her best to focus on the task at hand. Laughing, she explains that, right now, the hardest part of the show is how Juliet delivers a lot of dialogue from the front line. “She literally lives on the edge. I have definitely nearly fallen off the stage a couple times,” she says.
Often, throughout our conversation, Amewudah-Rivers’s doe eyes are glossy, pointed to the ceiling, perhaps to prevent the actor from revealing the true toll of her pre-show ordeal. But she remains defiant. “I am still processing the knock-on effects. But you know, that kind of noise is designed to make people like us hide,” she says. “And I won’t.”
Photographs: Serena Brown. Styling: Lois Adeoshun. Photographer’s assistant: Alex Galloway. Hair: Abra Kennedy. Make-up: Maha Alselami. Production: Diana Eastman. With thanks to The Duke of York’s Theatre.
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