Simone Ashley and Charithra Chandran Gush About Joining ‘Bridgerton’ Season 2

Almost as soon as Bridgerton Season 2 starts, it’s clear that the ton is in desperate need of a jolt of excitement. The show’s dashing Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page) is gone, living happily ever off screen, the Queen (Golda Rosheuvel) is struggling to find a diamond to succeed Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor), and Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) can’t seem to find anyone good enough to be his bride. That’s when the Sharma sisters arrive from India and shake the Netflix hit up. Kate (Simone Ashley) and Edwina Sharma (Charithra Chandran) bring beauty, grace, and otherworldly charm to Bridgerton Season 2…both on and off screen.

“It was amazing working with them,” Queen Charlotte herself — Golda Rosheuvel — told Decider. “I’m sure it was really daunting for them coming into the show. They took to it like ducks to water. They sorted in so well. They both got such wonderful beautiful temperaments.”

“Oh they were terrible, it was hell,” Adjoa Andoh, who plays the imperious Lady Danbury, deadpanned. “No, they’re just lovely, lovely, smart, intelligent, beautiful, thoughtful actors. Good at their craft and always reflecting on things and very generous to work with as well. You want to work with actors who you feel are just, they’re playing with you. They’re not sort of in their own show. Both of them absolutely were terrific at that.”

Bridgerton Season 2 is based on The Viscount Who Loved Me, the second book in Julia Quinn’s best-selling Bridgerton series. Now that sister Daphne has found her happily ever after with Hastings, eldest brother Anthony has decided it’s time for him to do his duty and find a Viscountess. What the rest of the Bridgertons might not realize about their imperious oldest brother is that he’s carrying the weight of heartache and trauma. Not only has he only been burned by romance, but he’s still suffering from the sudden loss of their father years before. Anthony decides to throw love out of the equation when looking for a wife, and to pursue the woman he most believes can live up to the title of Viscountess.

Enter: the Sharma sisters. Anthony believes that younger sister Edwina will be the perfect bride, but sparks immediately fly between him and Edwina’s fiery older sister Kate.

“I wasn’t aware of the huge fandom particularly behind Kate and ‘#Kanthony’ in that sense,” Simone Ashley told Decider recently. “Only until I got the role, and it was kind of announced on the internet, that’s when I understood how many people adore the amazing character that is Kate. I think Julia Quinn created such a fun, powerful, confident female character. I guess only then, the penny dropped and I was like, ‘Wow okay, there’s a lot of people rooting for her.'”

It’s a good thing, then, that Ashley and Bailey are able to capture the sexual tension that made the pairing such a fan favorite amongst book readers.

“As two working actors, we definitely clicked,” Ashley said. “We were just equally as enthusiastic to bring this amazing, complicated love story to life. Chemistry is such a weird thing to articulate. It was such a joy to work with him.”

Before we get ahead of ourselves, Kate isn’t the only Sharma sister who finds herself falling for Lord Bridgerton. Edwina also finds herself swept off her feet and Bridgerton Season 2 makes it clear that Anthony and the younger Sharma sister have a unique connection of their own.

“I love ‘JB’ so much,” Charithra Chandran enthused to Decider. “He’s like the best big brother. Working with him is always such a pleasure. But what I’d say about Edwina and Anthony is that they see something in each other that only they understand: a title, a duty, an obligation that was imposed by someone else onto them.”

Anthony Bridgerton wasn’t the only person to fall hard for Kate and Edwina or the actresses who play them in Bridgerton Season 2.

“I worked with Charithra the most and she is exquisite, absolutely exquisite. Her attention to detail and her wanting to learn and ask questions. We had lots of amazing scenes together,” Rosheuval gushed.

“Simone and I, we both have dogs. We share a love of all things dog, so she gave me my best present last year which was a plastic lid that perfectly fit the top of my dog food cans. I use it every single day, so every single day I think about Simone,” Andoh said. “And Charithra, she’s pretty fresh-faced and new to this game and super smart, super bright, super focused, super curious about everything. Camera angles, lighting, text analysis, the whole thing. They were really fun to work with, really nice nice women.”

Simone Ashley and Charithra Chandran were also dazzled by each other on set. “Charithra is so wonderful. She’s such a people person. She’s very chatty, she loves to share opinions, to have debates. She’s so smart. She would just come in everyday with amazing, wonderful warm energy. Always making jokes, always being silly, always playing music,” Ashley said.

However both actresses wanted to point out that their relationship on set was a bit different from that of Kate and Edwina.

“I think that it was different in that, obviously for Kate and Edwina, the relationship is so amniotic. It’s very much information throws one way,” Chandran said. “I think that in Simone and I’s relationship, there’s a lot more parity, which is obviously a major difference. I think with Shelley Conn, who plays our mom, we were super lucky in that things flowed pretty naturally.”

“It was effortless for me to feel that I wanted to kind of, not big sister her because that sounds patronizing, but it was easy for me to fall in love with her as a sister,” Ashley said. “She’s definitely got a twinkle to her, that’s for sure.”

Ironically, it was that twinkle of Edwina’s that Charithra Chandran found to be “funny” for her to navigate on set.

“It’s so weird but, directors would be like, ‘Where’s my diamond?'” Chandran said, mocking a theatrical call from the directors in question. “It’s so cringe to be like, ‘Here…‘ It’s super flattering, with a lot of help with hair, makeup, and costume, but it’s kind of amazing and I think it’s kind of hilarious.”

“Behind-the-scenes, backstage in our green room, I’m just so different from what a diamond would be like. It was very funny for people to see me sort of turn it on and be Edwina and proper again,” Chandran said. “I think life is better when you’re not the diamond. That’s what I’d say. Life is way better when you’re not the diamond, the pressure is too much.”

Bridgerton Season 2 premieres on Netflix on Friday, March 25.

Watch Bridgerton on Netflix