“Bridgerton” star Adjoa Andoh endured brutal bullying at school over her skin color.
The actor, who plays Lady Danbury in the Netflix show, was born to an English mother and an upper-class Ghanaian father and was singled out as the only Black child at her school in the Cotswolds. Racist pupils at the school even smashed her head into walls.
“Having my head smashed against the wall in the infant school,” she told MailOnline when asked about her first memory of pain. “And it’s a traditional Cotswold stone county primary school, so Cotswold stone is bumpy.” An infant school is a school for children who are 7 years old and younger.
“You know like in the Beano you had ‘Gnnhhh!’ — all those exclamations of pain,” she continued. “As my head would hit I would see stars, but I would also see the cartoon bubble of ‘Gnnhhh!’”
However, Andoh was able to force the bullies to leave her alone once she began to fight back and headbutt the bullies.
“It stopped when I realized there was this thing I could do to make it stop,” the Bridgerton star recalled. “I was aware of being walloped a lot, and then I was aware of having to fight back …”
It took Andoh some time before she realized why she was being targeted.
“I sort of thought that was what happened at school until I was a bit older, and friends would say, ‘Oh, we’re going to go back to mine, we’ll have to get out before my mum comes because you’re not allowed in our house’,” she said.
“It would be that sort of thing and then you start to investigate that, but I think I must have been the end of infants before I twigged what that was,” Andoh explained. “I just thought that fighting was the thing. We were the [only] Black people in the 40, 50 miles radius. We were in the rural Cotswolds.”
Even with all of the horrific abuse Adjoa had to endure, the Adulthood actress can see the positives in how her ordeal shaped her future.
“It’s given me an absolute everlasting love of nature. It taught me very early on to be self-conscious, that I had to make people like me because they might not like me because of the look of me,” she said. “And I think that’s a terrible burden for a child.”
“If I’d stayed in the Cotswolds, there’s a life I could have had that would have been working for Lloyds bank, getting married, settling down and just being there forever,” Andoh said. “That could have been a very nice life but I don’t think it’s a life I’m gifted for.”
