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 as Lady Macduff, at The Globe itself. And so when she landed the role of Juliet opposite ’s Romeo, , it must have been a pinch-me moment.
Before then, she was best known for Jack Whitehall’s TV show . 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 . More than 800 Black actors, including Lashana Lynch, Lolly Adefope and Wunmi Mosaku, signed an open letter co-created by 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 .
