For the 31-year-old actress Bessie Carter, playing the English writer Nancy Mitford in BritBox’s new historical drama, Outrageous, was like reconnecting with an old friend. While casting the show, premiering on Wednesday, few on the production team knew that Carter had already been on a long date with Mitford—seven hours and 38 minutes, to be exact—having narrated her most celebrated novel, The Pursuit of Love (1945), for Audible in 2021.
Born the eldest of seven (six girls) in an aristocratic family that can best be described as posh but not flush, Mitford wrote what she knew. Now she and her sisters—Pam, Diana, Unity (who is known for her infatuation with Adolf Hitler), Decca, and Deborah—are at the center of Outrageous. Set during the rise of Fascism in 1930s Europe, the show, written by Sarah Williams, follows them through their drama-filled escapades.
“I have a Mitford shelf,” Carter tells me, referring to her collection of books by and about the family, a few of whom were writers, although none as clever or revered as Nancy.
Beyond her family, Nancy was the face of London’s Bright Young Things. They, too, are the focus of Outrageous, which takes viewers into the city’s bohemian underbelly, capturing a lifestyle that, as Carter points out, Nancy symbolized but rarely actually lived herself.
“She was kind of one foot in the door and one foot out the door with the Bright Young Things. She was actually quite traditional, wasn’t as progressive, though she was very open-minded, and was a romantic at heart,” Carter explains. “Because she was the eldest and closest to her parents, I think she felt that pressure to get married and have a child, and that just turned out to be the thing that she wanted the most.”
This isn’t Carter’s first time playing an aristocrat. It isn’t even the first time she’s played a cash-strapped British aristocrat hoping to marry her way out of trouble. That honor belongs to her role in Shonda Rhimes’s Regency-era juggernaut, Bridgerton, where she has played the spoiled and naïve Prudence, of the Featherington family, since 2020.
Before that, Carter appeared alongside Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen in the 2017 drama Howards End, based on the E. M. Forster novel. “People keep saying I have a period face,” she says with a shrug and a knowing smile.
Tall, with untamed brunette ringlets, a strong nose, and soft blue eyes, the London native takes after her parents, the actors Jim Carter (Downton Abbey) and Imelda Staunton (Harry Potter, The Crown).
When asked what it was like growing up with actors, Carter says, “They were just mom and dad.” On following in their footsteps, she adds, “I did go to set or was backstage a lot, hiding behind the curtains when my dad was doing a play. But funnily enough, it was just also what I enjoyed the most at school. It was my favorite subject. I did every school play. I auditioned for the National Youth Theater. I did Saturday lessons. I just loved it. And I don’t know whether that is genetic or nature versus nurture, but it was just something that felt like an extension of what I did as a kid, which was dressing up and playing.”
Carter dutifully climbed the theater world’s ladder. While in high school at London’s Camden School for Girls, she was an assistant stage manager, then a stage manager, for a puppet show at a small pub theater. She then worked as a dresser, facilitating quick changes for the West End production of Mamma Mia! In 2013, she began her studies at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, graduating three years later.
With her first leading TV role premiering this week, she’s also making her West End debut, starring opposite Staunton in Dominic Cooke’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s mother-daughter play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
“It’s weirdly, incredibly normal, looking over in the rehearsal room and seeing my mum there. It’s like we’ve done it before,” Carter says.
Despite telling her agents she didn’t want to do any more period dramas, she couldn’t help but feel drawn to this one, set in the 1930s. “I’m slowly creeping my way up,” she laughs. “Soon I’ll be in the 1980s!”
Outrageous premieres on BritBox on June 18, with new episodes coming out weekly until July 15
Carolina de Armas is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
