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Simone Ashley is waiting for me, perched serenely near the window of a Greek grocery shop just off the main drag of London’s Broadway Market. I’m not late, so that makes her early. Dressed in athleisure and tennies, she greets me with a relaxed hug like we’re old pals—surprising, since hugging strangers is not particularly English. I melt awkwardly into it like the American expat I am, thawing out after having avoided physical contact with other people for two years during the pandemic. It all makes more sense when she tells me that, despite being British, she’s a California girl at heart, having moved to Los Angeles as a teenager to pursue acting, which kicked off a decade of living between L.A. and London. “I love the ocean so much,” she says, pulling out her phone to show me a picture of her cocker spaniel frolicking on the California coast.
By now, several million Netflix subscribers have been introduced to Ashley, who stars as Kate Sharma in the massively anticipated second season of Bridgerton, but when we meet, the premiere is still a month away, and the 27-year-old’s anonymity is somewhat intact. She’s summoned me to this particular locale—a bustling street market where you can order fresh oysters on the sidewalk and idle away the day from stall to stall—because it’s where everything started coming together for her.
She spent her early twenties here, living with friends, going on dates, and trying to make ends meet as a young actress. “I got Sex Education living on this street,” she says, referring, of course, to the hilarious and raunchy Netflix show on which she plays mean girl Olivia Hanan. It was the first recurring television role she’d landed after several years of playing bit characters with one- to three-episode arcs. Decent work, nothing glamorous, but those early gigs gave her the space to live and learn, which, in many ways, is all you can hope for in your early twenties.
“This area reminds me of a really innocent time in my life,” she says. “The sun was shining, and I would ride my bike down the canal to the park. I’d go to the gym, walk my dog, wait for my agent to call. There were young artists everywhere.” Later, when we walk to a nearby bakery for cardamom and turmeric buns, she points to a window with a tiny flower box above a uniform supply company. “My best friend used to live there, and we would just smoke our cigarettes outside that window, watching the world go by and waving to boys.”
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Between the pandemic and the prospect of joining a wildly popular streaming series, the past two years have been a time of significant growth, Ashley says. “When you get thrown into this industry, especially as a young woman, you’ve got to learn quickly how to take care of yourself—how to use your voice, how to set boundaries, how to speak up for yourself.” Kate has those qualities in spades, I offer, and Ashley agrees, adding, “Sometimes she has a bit of an imbalance of it. Sometimes she can be a bit too hard-core—not that I judge her.”
It’s a delicate affair, after all, to draw boundaries in a show like Bridgerton, a fantastical environment fixated on bodies, fashions, proclivities, and sex. Fans despaired upon learning that Regé-Jean Page’s Duke of Hastings—and his beloved backside—would not be returning. When I tell Ashley that several Bridgerton fans I’ve talked with independently volunteered that the Duke’s butt was their favorite part of season one, she laughs. “No way. The Duke’s butt? Oh my God, that’s so funny.” We joke about how it’s probably no accident that the first nudity in season two is the rear view of Jonathan Bailey, who plays Kate’s love interest, Anthony Bridgerton. Also clear within the first 15 minutes of episode one: Ashley has the acting chops for her role—and maybe more of Kate’s moxie than she realizes.
“I yearn for someone fresh, someone unexpected, to turn this season on its head,” says Golda Rosheuvel’s campy Queen Charlotte in one early scene, as she mulls over which young lady to designate as the social season’s most desirable match, or “diamond.” Shortly after, viewers catch their first glimpse of Kate, a mysterious woman in a black velvet hooded cape galloping fiercely across a meadow. Her morning ride draws the immediate curiosity of Anthony, whose assigned task this season is to find a wife. When Kate whooshes past, he trots off in pursuit, worried she might be in danger. Kate, who has borrowed the horse without permission from her hostess, Lady Danbury, becomes annoyed by this and swears in Hindi, her character’s mother tongue, before turning her morning ride into a sweaty horse race. A game is afoot.
Ashley plays Kate with a sharp edge—she’s serious to the point of stoicism. “I think she and Anthony mirror each other in that sense, because he’s always in charge, and then they kind of meet their match. I think a lot of people can relate to that type of relationship, where there’s a feeling so strong with someone, and maybe it initiates as, ‘Oh my God, I hate you,’ ” she says—adding that she “100 percent” pulled from her personal life to connect with her character. From the start, she felt aligned with Kate, an independent woman with a foot on two continents. “All I’ve ever really known is moving around and being on my own, but in the most positive way. I enjoy it. And I think that this character, in particular, has a life where she’s had to be on her own quite a bit.”
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Shonda Rhimes, one of three executive producers for the show, says she knew Ashley would make a perfect Kate almost immediately: “We have incredible casting directors who search far and wide and listen to us about the way we see the roles. It was wonderful for Simone to be placed in front of us, as she was exactly what we were looking for.”
Bailey fell in love with the character of Kate while reading The Viscount Who Loved Me, the second book in the Bridgerton series, upon which the season is based. “And then meeting Simone, she made more sense as Kate than I even knew was possible,” he says. “She holds moments in such a composed way. And my gosh, her eyes can tell a hundred thousand stories.”
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In some respects, it sounds like Ashley was plucked out of thin air, but that would do a disservice to all the groundwork she’s done: the learning curve, the experiences—good and bad—that come with starting out young in the entertainment industry.
Born in Surrey, England, Ashley grew up in a “very quiet household,” she says, but one that was filled with music. “We had a record player, and [my parents] would listen to Fleetwood Mac, Bob Marley, the Doors, the Rolling Stones.” She also recalls being raised on a steady diet of Disney classics until encountering Quentin Tarantino’s violent revenge fantasy Kill Bill in her early teens, which inspired her to give acting a try. Because she had grown up visiting family in California, Hollywood didn’t seem so distant.
By her late teens, Ashley had signed with a modeling agency. “I told them, ‘I don’t want to be a model. I want to be an actor,’ ” she says. So they got to work, helping her nab her first film role. “I was a blink-and-you-miss-me party girl in Straight Outta Compton,” she says with a smile, but she used the cameo to secure an acting agent and slightly bigger parts on shows like Wolfblood and Broadchurch, before landing her breakout role in Sex Education. The constant auditioning was stressful, she says, “but I was never fearful. I just always knew [acting] was something I was born to do.”
While Ashley’s provocative performance as Bridgerton’s Kate will likely make her a household name, her time spent playing Sex Education’sOlivia Hanan was excellent preparation for dealing with excruciatingly intimate sex scenes—both on set and, in some ways, in real life. “I was quite nerdy in school, or maybe innocent, in that I grew up quite slowly until I was about 15 or 16. I wasn’t part of, like, the cool mean-girls’ group,” she says, adding that she tried to bring that same vulnerability, or “clumsiness,” to Olivia. “I was portraying a 16-year-old, so there was a very different tone, more the comedic side of it all,” she says.
With Bridgerton, the mood is more “romantic and steamy,” she adds. “We didn’t have body doubles. We knew what we were getting into, but the scenes were beautifully shot, and we tried to portray female pleasure, seeing it from that point of view, which was really interesting.” It also helped that she and Bailey got along like gangbusters. “We encouraged each other to just take it all in, and [accept that] it’s never going to be the same ever again,” she says. “Having anonymity, and then filming a show this big.” Seeing the first few episodes affected her in a way she didn’t expect. “God, it just really captures your imagination, and it is a fairy tale,” she says softly. “As I watched the first dance with Jonny and me, I was just so emotional, I find it hard to admit.”
For Bailey, the scene marked the moment when he and Ashley stepped into the main love story and “existed in the space that I’d seen Phoebe [Dynevor] and Regé [-Jean Page] do so beautifully in season one,” he says. “We have this amazing team, but ultimately it comes down to just me and Simone. It was one of the purest moments between us—completely overwhelming at the time, and really moving to watch.”
Walking through the park Ashley used to bike to as a fledgling actor, she tells me she’s about to head back to California to take some meetings and maybe film a late-night appearance or two. “I do love it there and miss it a lot. I may bring my dog and stay for a few months,” she says. “I’ve got some really good friends [in L.A.] who aren’t a part of the industry, and we just drive in our cars and eat banana pudding and talk about boys.” She smiles, her cheeks reddening. “Well, you know, we talk about other stuff, too.”
Christina Ebenezer
Hair by Issac Poleon and manicure by Simone Cummings, both at CLM Agency; makeup by Porsche Poon; set design by Joanna Goodman; produced by Yasser Abubeker.
This article appears in the May 2022 issue of ELLE.
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