‘Bridgerton’ Author Julia Quinn on How Shonda Rhimes Unexpectedly Discovered Her Book Series

julia quinn first imagined the world of bridgerton in 2000 when she published the duke and i and much of what we're seeing on the screen today stays true to what she put in the pages of her book then and since the netflix show has taken off her books have been flying off the shelves even more selling out and by the way some hard copies reportedly going for as much as eight hundred dollars as collector's items please welcome new york times best-selling author and a consulting producer on richardson julia quinn julia my goodness congratulations on all of the success the book is now back on the new york times bestsellers list these last three weeks how good does it feel to be you right now i don't have words and i write words for a living so i don't know i mean i just i feel like every day something happens and i'm just giggling it's one of those things where you're so happy you just start laughing i love that people that's how i feel like hearing your backstory because it's like what is it 30 years ago that you were eating a tub of ben and jerry's ice cream i'm told while reading a romance novel it was her senior year at harvard now there you are with the ice cream so you had me at the ice cream but you're in this moment in your life and then you become inspired yeah i you know i think a lot of 21 22 year old people or just they've no idea what they want to do with life and and i'm eating this tub of ice cream and i'm thinking you know maybe i'll be a doctor that was the first thing because i was just you know it it was kind of like who knows how to get a job right nobody knows how to get a job but i knew how to apply to school right so i thought okay well i'll go to med school but i hadn't done any of my med school requirements so i was going to need to take a couple years to do that and so i wasn't going to be able to get a full-time job and i thought well maybe i'll try to write a book while i do that because i really love to read and what i love to read romance novels so while i was taking organic chemistry and physics and all that stuff i started writing my first book well i mean you had what eight successful novels before the duke and i listen i get it you love to read a lot of us love to read i grew up looking at my aunt's harlequin romances when i was way too young really to be reading some of that stuff so you know this kind of reminds me of that romance and slash lustfulness that can just envelop all of us when you started putting pen to paper and these characters particularly in the duke and i started to come out what did you envision with any romance novel i think what you're mostly envisioning is the feeling that you get when you read one um and i think that's something that the show does incredibly well when you watch this first series and it's so exciting to say first series of bridgeton um you finish you get i think you have the same emotional sense as when you read a romance novel or in my case a historical romance novel which is you know your heart's pounding a little bit and you're so excited for them and then you get the happy ending and when you're done you're happy yeah and so i think that's what i envision every time well that's how i felt watching this series that's how we feel reading the book so let me ask you what happened with this incident at a starbucks we know award-winning showrunner shonda rhimes um was interested in bridgerton how did you learn that she was interested in what happened at this starbucks it was it came out of nowhere i was just sitting there you know as one does pretending to write in a starbucks and my phone rang and it was my agent and he said um have you heard of shonda rhimes this guy went uh yes and he said well i just had the most interesting call and i was just i mean i practically fell off the stool because nobody was adapting romance novels you know people will ask me how did you sell it and i'll say i didn't do anything i i you know the way i understand it shonda ran out of books to read on vacation and somehow stumbled on one of mine and it's crazy to think that my life is forever changed because shonda didn't bring enough reading material on vacation but that's honestly what happened i love that how did you learn is because a big part of the draw with the netflix show is the diversity the duke obviously um is black and the queen which is not a character that was originally in is black and you have all this richness of diversity um how did you learn that that would be the interpretation uh brought to the show well i mean i think i suspected it from the beginning because this is a shondaland show and one of the things shondaland is known for and and that i love it for is the diversity within it shows and so i was curious how they were going to do it because it is a little different bringing this level of diversity and inclusion to a historical piece than it is to say grey's anatomy um but you know i learned about it when they sent me the list of cast honestly in the scripts it wasn't clear except for the character will mondrich he was the only one identified in the script by race and so i saw the cast and i just thought it was amazing did it take your breath away did you i mean you know it isn't amazing of course shonda one of the most genius show runners but to to realize that oh my gosh this will also be a cultural touch point this is an interracial couple you know in this period drama this queen charlotte is just everybody's um you know uh best friend in our heads if we have a best friend that happens to be a queen that judges everyone you know and they are all prominent and they are black and it will be distributed though for everyone to fall in love with you know the feeling that i have most is just gratitude yeah um because and i want to sort of dial it back a second and i think what's really important in addition to looking at the casting is to recognize the diversity behind the camera the writers room was incredibly diverse the the four directors of the show um they were not all white men which is wonderful and um and i think what happens there is that you know i'm one person i can do i can only be as diverse as i am and i can bring so much but when you bring in all these people with their own imaginations and with their own lived experiences they can expand the original story and make it just more colorful colorful and more diverse and more wonderful and i'm just i'm so grateful to them for that i was so struck by this headline um that the steamy sex scenes between daphne and simon have been so inquired about on adult entertainment sites is that one of the strangest things that you've heard just because it is so steamy is that how you envision when you wrote about the romance and the exploits in the book you know i don't think that technically the scenes are actually much more intimate or explicit than other stuff we're seeing on television or in the movies i think the difference is that it's being shown from a more female-centric gaze and that makes it feel sexier to us certainly to us you know as women and i think that's why people are suddenly thinking oh this is so different this is so sexy but it's not actually more explicit it's just you know finally we get to look at things the way we want to right i think that's a great point it is from that perspective which is interesting you mentioned from the female perspective as you well know um there have been articles written and i don't want to give away anything a spoiler alert so do not get mad at me um but there is a conversation over consent from the woman's perspective of making a decision um involving simon and daphne um were you at all concerned about that with so much talk about consent and what what agency means yeah i mean it's fascinating to me because when the book came out over 20 years ago there wasn't a peep about that scene nobody said a word in fact the reaction was more you go girl um and so i think it's really fascinating kind of from a historical perspective to see the difference in how we now view her actions and i think i think there are a couple things at work there i think one is that the metoo movement and just general awareness has uh kind of honed our understanding of what consent is and i think that's a good thing but also i think that even though we're not remotely where we need to be in terms of gender power balance we have moved in the last 21 years and what it means is that i think it's more difficult for women of today to identify with daphne's utter powerlessness in her society if you were daphne in that marriage right in that society you know with a husband who could banish you to another country what would you do yeah that's what's so compelling about it you do find yourself in their world i got to ask you real quick season two it's going to surround daphne's brother anthony the vi count who love me is the books at the next book that you did what do you expect the same reaction obviously i think you would expect the same reaction um that we've seen this first time around oh i hope so because man they just set anthony up oh he's gonna get it it's gonna be so good i can't wait well congratulations on this phenomenal success and by the way just being an inspiration you know many writers will be sitting in bed with their ben and jerry's and they will think of you and what's happened and ben and jerry should dedicate um one of they always name their ice creams they should name a bridgerton after the series and you that's my oh my gosh that's my vote i'm going to put it out there that would be like the pinnacle of my career if that happened julia thank you congratulations on everything bye thanks

Channel: Tamron Hall Show

Views: 164,373

Keywords: Tamron hall, tamron hall show, daytime television, television, interviews, celebrity, celeb, celebrity interviews, tv, abc, Disney, Coronavirus, bridgerton, simon hastings, the duke and i, Julia quinn, Julia Quinn bridgerton, bridgeton shona rhimes, shondaland, Shonda rimes, Daphne bridgerton

Id: h4K2FJMtpIU

Length: 10min 8sec (608 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021