“And she was like, ‘Oh, my God you’ve landed Bridgerton,’ and all of a sudden I didn’t care anymore whether I got. “I got the phone call from my agent,” the How to Stop a Recurring Dream star told The Daily Mail at the time. “Then obviously, getting the casting through from Bridgerton and seeing it’s a Shonda Rhimes thing, that diversity is the main objective of the show - it was just amazing to be a part of it.”īarker had previously planned to audition for another Netflix hit, Sex Education, before getting the news she’d been cast in the Shondaland production - something she considered a dream come true. I saw that film and was like, ‘Wow, it would be so amazing to play that character but it’s already been made, I’m probably not gonna be in a period drama simply because of my race,’” Barker told The Daily Mailin a February 2021 interview. “I’d seen Belle, the film about Dido Elizabeth Belle, who was a mixed-race aristocrat in the Georgian period of time.