Bridgerton cast are “grateful” for season 2, says star

"It was so amazing, actually," she said. "I think we all had a bit of a lump in our throat when we got together on that first Zoom call, to do the first read-through of season two. Because, you know, it wasn’t just that there was a hiatus; it was the nature of the hiatus.

"We’d wrapped filming just before the first lockdown," she added. "So everybody’s lived through really difficult times. There were lots of challenges and sadnesses and difficulties. I think like everybody in the world, really, we’ve all come back slightly bruised and conscious of the blessings that we have, and are more sympathetic to each other’s sorrows, I think."

She continued: "I think we all lost a layer of skin, you know, as has the world. It’s made us all slightly more grateful for our lives, I think, and slightly more attentive to each other’s lives. And I think that’s no bad thing. In amongst a lot of bad things, that’s no bad thing.

"So, yeah, it was moving in a way that it wouldn’t have been, had we just had a big gap, and we’d all come back and gone, 'Oh, I haven’t seen you for ages. How are you?'

"It was properly, 'I haven’t seen you for ages. How are you? How are you?' It was a different sort of coming together."

Speaking about filming during the pandemic, she added that she felt "enormously grateful" in part because she has so many colleagues who work in live arts who "have had the most hellish nearly-two years now".

"That’s been going since April. So that’s been long. And The Witcher, I was doing that just prior to that.

"So I just feel enormously grateful to know that there are COVID protocols in place that mean I can keep working, and that I get tested regularly, so I know how well I am. I just feel very privileged to have that all available to me, when so many people are really having a tough time."

Before Bridgerton returns to our screens for season two, Andoh is starring in another huge Netflix show – joining the cast of The Witcher as Nenneke – and she said she's enjoyed appearing in two such different shows.

"It’s rather lovely, as an actor, to be in two smash-hit shows on a smash-hit platform. So that was really lovely," she said.

"And also to be doing something that’s different genres. And they’re both shows that have got big, ambitious broad strokes to the way that they’re conceived, and the way that they’re worked out.

"They’ve got quite a humane centre to them, even with monsters. So, you know, you sort of get a lot of richness as an actor in the sort of interplay of the bigness – the macro and the micro of it, I guess, which I like."

Additional reporting by Huw Fullerton.

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