The above toast comes from the famous blue soup, green gunge and orange marmalade party. However, culinary faux pas are quickly forgotten because Bridget Jones is told by Mark Darcy that he likes her, just the way she is.

For many, the film is forever cemented (along with the refusal to admit that Renee Zellweger isn’t really British…still in denial) as a classic early noughties’ romantic comedy. Alongside this, it also makes for difficult retrospective realisations regarding societal expectations of love, relationships, body image, self-worth, career goals and plenty more.

Seriously, she had her own flat…. in London….in Zone 1…. Leave her alone.

With the above aspects and conversations regarding diversity, inclusion and intersectional approaches to storytelling on Western screens and stages becoming more prevalent, it is clear that questions are being asked about who a romantic leading lady is. The first example that comes to mind is Netflix’s smash hit Bridgerton, where Simone Ashley and Charithra Chandran’s Kate and Edwina were the absolute IT- girls of the ton. They were impeccably dressed, with subtle nods to their heritage through language and cardamom pods for tea, impeccably lit on screen and impeccably clear with their wants and needs from prospective eligible bachelors – complete with a haldi ceremony to an orchestral version of Kabhi Kushi Khabi Gham.

Despite its existing within the hyper-fantastical story world of Shonda Rhymes, seeing those women on screen was an absolute game-changer in terms of no other characters questioning their beauty, intelligence, ambitions or self-worth. This essence is also prevalent in Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts by Nida Manzoor, which follows a diverse group of Muslim women trying to sustain a punk band – watch it and thank me later.

While the show is hilarious, heavily satirical and often leans into the crazy, during Season Two we are snapped back into a reality during a heated conversation between the band’s lead guitarist Amina (who wears a hijab) and Ahsan, revealing how brown Muslim women are often viewed with homogenised lenses before the lens of ‘woman’ is even considered.

In the scene, Ahsan ‘warns’ her that she should steer clear of an English man because he is exoticising her, to which she responds by asking if ‘the idea of someone liking me is so repulsive that they could only be exoticising me?’.

These types of projections onto women from men within the same ethnic minority culture (honestly a whole separate realm waiting to be written about) are truly, frustratingly all too common, even more so when it turns out that Amina’s character as a visible South Asian Muslim woman is later described as a ‘thrilling’ prospect by said Englishman for his ‘rebellion against the system’.

It is a harsh reminder that both on and off the page, there is much work to be done to get these shifts moving, as women of colour and those from different faiths have and are still often presented as completely void of romantic desirability. This is mainly due to the classic combination of pre-established beauty ideals, fetishisation or being seen merely as steps in someone else’s journey of self-discovery with no in-between.

This is a fact that actress Ambika Mod was all-too aware of to the extent that she initially turned down auditioning for Emma Morley’s character for Netflix’s adaptation of One Day, following Anne Hathaway’s previous iteration in the film. In an interview with Glamour she recalled feeling immense impostor syndrome and that she couldn’t take on the character.

Growing up, she never saw herself in rom-coms and therefore never considered herself the ‘type’ to be cast as a romantic lead. Having watched the show, there is one instance that accounts for Emma’s ‘brownness’ with her mother being a lapsed Hindu, other than that, she just does things. By this, we see her express her want to do something meaningful, call nonsense out when she sees it, make the wrong decisions, be cynical, encourage others, fail miserably, get angry, fall deeply in love, have her heart broken, lash out, show immense kindness, write novels, travel to Paris and everything in between. This was a much needed refresher, given that portrayals of South Asian women in particular tend to stay within the remit of ‘good girl gone bad’ i.e. getting with a Caucasian man and defying the odds or ‘bad girl turned good’, i.e. a wayward girl finds her faith and culture through a life -changing trip to the motherland, falling in love with the shy boy in a kurta along the way.

This isn’t to say that those storylines cannot and have not been done well. Instead, Mod’s multi-dimensional portrayal focuses our attention not on why Emma is there, but rather what she is doing, where she is headed and the complexities of her relationships, experiences and feelings of self-worth. Arguably, this Emma Morley offers far more nuance in a way that brings Mod’s hopes of making more like her ‘feel seen’ to fruition.

The notions of feeling seen and self-worth are also at the crux of Candice Carty William’s bestseller Queenie, which gave us a searing insight into life through the eyes of a young Black woman faced with blatant and constant misogynoir (a term coined by Moya Bailey referring to the simultaneous racism and sexism levelled at Black women). As the iterations of Emma Morley and the Sharma sisters question who can be seen as a romantic lead, this year’s release of the serial adaptation of Queenie has us realising how the 2019 novel screamed the absolute need to reckon with how society treats and continues to treat Black women in the dating sphere and beyond.

After the first reading, it was confusing that the novel had been touted as a ‘Black Bridget Jones’ by Carty Williams herself, given the layers of trauma that her protagonist endures on a daily basis. There was some ‘com’, but very little ‘rom’.  However, with the arrival of the series she recently clarified that:

“When I said Queenie was the Black Bridget Jones, I meant this shouldn’t be a quiet publication,” Carty-Williams says. “Bridget Jones’s Diary was in most women’s houses that I knew when I was growing up. I stole my first copy from my aunt. I wanted Queenie to be in everyone’s house, too.” – The Guardian, May 2024.

Carrying the burdens of a deeply troubled past yet never afforded the agency to express them, Queenie’s sense of self is stamped on repeatedly to the point where she seeks love, validation and comfort in the wrong places. This leads to only further damage her emotional, sexual and physical well-being due to fundamental parts of her identity being taken from her, twisted with a strong dose of ‘you’re too much’ and then shoved in her face as the reasons why she is not deserving of love be it familial, platonic or romantic.

While Bridgerton, We Are Lady Parts and One Day in their respective formats mirror the steady carvings of progress against the narrow concrete ideals of who can perform a romantic leading role, the resurgence of Queenie and her story serves as a stark reflection that we still have a lot of chiselling to do. Though fictional, they speak against a pattern of romantic erasure for brown and black women that is firmly rooted in reality, which couldn’t have been more stark following the casting announcement of Francesca Amewudah-Rivers in Jamie Lloyd’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet alongside Tom Holland in London.

Bizarrely, the role has already been played by an African American actress on Broadway (Condola Rashad opposite Orlando Bloom), yet Amewudah-River’s casting resulted in sickening vitriol online, all boiling down to how she could not possibly play the character due to her blackness. Though the actress’ performance has garnered rave reviews, the initial deluge and the conversations surrounding it harkens back to societal ideals of beauty which still remain anchored in Eurocentricity – making the very idea of a black actress playing Juliet, perhaps the most romantic leading lady of all time, unfathomable.

It is here that Maya Angelou’s words on how racism becomes part of us “…as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstream” (1993) ring even louder and clearer than before. The women we grow up watching receive love on screen and stage be it familial, platonic and especially romantic stay with us. We root for them, laugh with them and often cry with them as they try to navigate what it means to be worthy.

Just as we rooted for Bridget to be loved by Mark Darcy just the way she is, there also needs to be a continued rooting for brown and black women to be loved on and off the page, just the way they are.