“Bridgerton”'s Charithra Chandran Auditioned For the Role of Kate Sharma Before Landing Edwina

“I never didn’t want to be an actress,” Chandran told Shondaland, but despite those dreams, she almost chose a more “practical” career path. She attended the prestigious Oxford University and had a “five-year plan” to go into the public policy field.

Despite those concerns, she told the publication, she decided to take a risk and pursue acting – and it has definitely paid off!

“I feel scared a little bit because getting to actually be a professional actor, I can only liken it to finding your true love, if you believe in such a notion,” she said. “I imagine that when you find your true love, you reflect on [your previous] relationships and go, ‘I never really loved [them].’ That’s kind of how I feel about acting, that I found that thing that I was always supposed to do. And now, if I were to go back to the corporate job, if I were to go to law school, whatever, before the acting career, I think I would have been happy in those parts. But now, I wouldn’t. Because I know that this is where I feel complete.”

Despite being very different from the sweet, shy Edwina Sharma, Chandran went all-out in finding ways to really connect with her character.

“Having played her now, I love her so much because she has so many good things that are often not considered valuable in our society,” she explained to The Kit. “She chooses to trust people, which you could see as naïveté or immaturity, but it’s a choice that she makes to see the best in others. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone could be a bit more like Edwina?”

Chandran also told The Kit that she even had a fun way to get into Edwina’s mindset: She put together a playlist to track the character’s arc throughout the season.

As it so happens, Chandran actually auditioned to play Kate before landing the role of Edwina!

“I had a few auditions for that, and decided it just didn’t work out. And that was fine. By then, I’d had another offer for a TV show. So, in the new year I was like, ‘Okay, one door closes; another opens. It just wasn’t meant to be. Oh, well,'” she told Shondaland. Of course, that wasn’t the end of the “Bridgerton” process for her after all.

“When I first auditioned for ‘Bridgerton,’ my mom had said – and she’s never said this before – ‘I think you’re going to get this. You’re going to be a part of this show ‘… And then in February, as I was in the makeup chair on the other job, I got a call from my agent telling me that they wanted to see me again for ‘Bridgerton’ but as the youngest sister. I told him I wanted to think about it; I didn’t want to do it as a consolation prize because I wanted to be able to candidly feel passionate about the character rather than just desperately wanting to be on the show. Which I obviously did! So, I read the book again, and I heard what they had planned for Edwina, and I thought that, actually, this is a very important story to be told because so many young women across the world, particularly brown women, are in Edwina’s situation. And I thought that I could make a difference with this character and with this story line.”

One of the most notable changes in the second season of “Bridgerton” is changing the book series’ Sheffield family to the Sharma family, reflecting a cast of British-Indian actors in the roles.

“I was born in the U.K. and moved back to India for a year or so with my dad at one point. I’m from Tamil Nadu, which is the southernmost state in India. We’re Dravidians, which is different from the Indo-Aryan peoples. Our language, Tamil, does not derive from Sanskrit, though it’s as old as Sanskrit,” Chandran told Shondaland.

“So, our culture and our history is very unique to our area, [where] you can see a lot of Tamil pride. It makes me so happy to see so many Tamils doing so well in this industry and in others – Aziz Ansari; Padma Lakshmi; Mindy Kaling; Maitreyi Ramakrishnan; the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai; and maybe the most famous example, Kamala Harris.”

“I think it’s an immense privilege to be able to act with other South Asian actors,” she added in an interview with WION. “I have never taken it for granted. And I am so excited for all the little brown girls and young women to see the both of us on screen. I hope that I can serve as sort of a role model and inspire other South Asian girls to pursue their dreams.”

Although Chandran’s acting career is just taking off, she’s already learned a ton from the projects she’s been involved in.

“Ultimately, what I learned from all the amazing actors that I’ve worked with is that you just need to be prepared. If you know your lines, then you can forget about them in a way and just have a play and be fully reactive, and that’s where the magic and the spark happens,” she told WION.

“Generally what this has taught me is sometimes you need to bet on yourself, and you need to take a risk. Abandoning a very prestigious and more stable career path in pursuit of my dreams is a big risk, especially with two traditionally academic Indian parents. But it has been the most rewarding experience in my life. I’ve never been happier.”

Chandran loves fashion, and one brand in particular has been part of some special memories in her life is Dior.

“The brand feels very personal to me,” she told Vogue at the 2022 fall fashion show during Paris Fashion Week. Chandran recalled that J’adore Dior was the first perfume her father bought for her mother and that she herself loved the little bottle of perfume. She described receiving her own first bottle of Miss Dior perfume as a teenager as a “coming of age” moment.

Chandran also loves the excitement of fashion “There’s a buzz in the air…It gets my creative juices flowing,” she said of Fashion Week itself. “We all want to feel our best and feel beautiful.”