There’s one beloved Bridgerton character with her hand in all the goings on of London high society, aka the ton, in Season 2. Sure, anonymous gossip columnist Lady Whistledown reports on the drama, but the ton’s unofficial leader, Lady Danbury, orchestrates it. As the new social season begins, and Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) declares it time to finally find a wife, Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) graciously agrees to sponsor the debutante debuts of two young ladies who immediately catch his eye: Miss Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley) and Miss Edwina Sharma (Charithra Chandran), recently arrived from India with their mother, Lady Mary (Shelley Conn).

When Edwina is declared the diamond of the season — the brightest gem among the marriage-eligible ladies — it’s in part thanks to Lady Danbury's influence. Lady Danbury always knows what’s going on. Everybody likes her, though people might be a little afraid of her. She commands respect without being too intimidating and can move between various social groups with ease. In another world, she’d be the perfect Lady Whistledown, but in this reality, she’s the most valuable asset to anyone Bridgerton-adjacent and is the one who sets the events of this season into motion.

“Lady Danbury has been around the ton block a couple of times, so she knows how things roll,” Andoh tells Tudum. “She’s a survivor. She has a great lust for life. She likes to satisfy her appetites, be it a gorgeous frock, a good smoke, a great brandy, dancing or beating all the other mamas at playing the game. She plays the game. Even in pall mall, she’s like, ‘Eloise, there! Get in the game and win.’ But we see Lady Danbury thinking she’s got things sewn up, and then events overtake her, and she suddenly has to go, ‘Right. So I’m not in control of everything. What are you going to do?’ ”

Even the puppet master can’t dictate everything, however, so Lady Danbury concentrates on the things she can control. She has influence over Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel), having grown up with her and shown her the ways of high society. In fact, that’s probably the most important tool Lady Danbury has at her disposal: knowing the rules of the ton intimately — and knowing how to bend them. Because ultimately, the queen is in charge. “It’s like jazz,” explains Andoh. “[Lady Danbury] can do all the classical chords if you need them, but then she can also get off onto a pentatonic scale and be playing in 7/8 time instead, or whatever the analogy is.”

And that’s precisely the reason why, in Andoh’s mind, there was never a question that her character would be Lady Whistledown. The gossipmonger operates in the shadows, while Lady Danbury operates in plain sight. She’s slick and smooth on the surface but calculating underneath. “It’s like a swan. She looks like she’s gliding, but [her] feet are paddling furiously under the water,” Andoh says. “It’s about her owning her own power and taking her own space. That’s really important to her.” Below, this season’s MVP tells Tudum about how Lady Danbury manages to command such respect, controlling her on-screen giggle fits with Ruth Gemmell (Bridgerton family matriarch Violet) and how her character manages to find herself in the middle of all the season’s drama.

Liam Daniel/Netflix

Where do you think Lady Danbury got her self-possession from?  
In Season 1, she tells little Simon the only way she could walk into a room when she was scared was to make herself the scariest person in the room. Lots of shy people do that. It’s like, “Look at the image, don’t look at this inside.” She’s had to work at gathering her courage and just walking into a room with confidence. [It] has grown and grown until it’s now, “I own the room.” I think it’s survival, plus her unique personality that says, “Life is fabulous and I want to eat all of it, I don’t want you to stop me eating all of it. So let me work out how I knock you out the way, go around you or make you my friend. What do I have to do?” 

She’s got a good strategic brain. She loves other women, and she loves them having their own power. If she’s your friend, she will be your friend right into the fire. If she sees you bullying other people, she will knock you sideways. And if she sees someone who’s vulnerable and needs protecting, she will stand in front of them. 

Do you know anyone like that in your life?  
My mother is fabulous. My mother is a great hat wearer. My mother, my aunts, my grandmothers had a lot of children and had to work extremely hard, and they always looked fabulous and they were funny. I wanted to celebrate us women who make lemonade out of lemons and are juggling kids and elderly relatives and work and household budgets and transport and laundry and everything else and still find time to huddle down with our girlfriends and have a laugh, a cry, a drink and a dance.

So how does Lady Danbury come to take the Sharmas under her wing?  
There’s this not-hugely-articulated history of the queen, Lady Mary and Lady Danbury and what happened in their younger days. I think Lady Danbury feels quite strongly that in terms of sisterly support [of Lady Mary, who was shunned by her family when she married Edwina and Kate’s father], they came up short. This is her moment to make amends and provide some restitution in the form of having the Sharmas stay on her dollar, on her reputation, and have it be her responsibility to reintroduce and rehabilitate the Sharmas at court and with the queen. That’s going to allow her to do that restitution and rehabilitation and have a little manipulation of the queen to boot. So the wheels starting to fall off further down the line leads to the moment where she’s hiding in a room and having hysterical giggles with Lady Violet — because you can’t control everything, and sometimes you just have to hold your hands up, surrender and go, “OK, what are we going to do? We going to cry? We going to laugh? I know. We just laugh.”

Liam Daniel/Netflix

One of the best things about Lady Danbury in the series and in the books is that she sees potential in people. She sees Penelope when no one else does. Are those characters going to grow closer like they do in the books? Have you read the books?
I’ve read the books and then parked the books. If I’ve been directing a Shakespeare or I’ve been in someone else’s production of a Shakespeare, nobody does the whole thing. Everybody does their edit. Shondaland took the structure and the spine of the books, and then meshed it through the Shondaverse. Queen Charlotte’s not in the books, [but] Queen Charlotte’s a huge part of what Bridgerton is in this iteration. 

Your point about Penelope [is] absolutely bang on. That thing we were just talking about [where] Lady Danbury [talks] to little Simon about being scared and having to make yourself into this other creature in order to survive, I think Penelope does that through Lady Whistledown. When I was at school discos when I was a child — I suppose they’d be like the prom — “Nights in White Satin” by Pink Floyd would be the smoochy song at the end of the evening. That’d be the moment when I’d be like, “I’m just going to go to the toilet now.” And [then] you come back, “Oh, the song finished. Oh, I missed it.” You draw from your own life, so there’s a little bit of Lady Danbury having to encourage herself. She sees the shyness in the wall-hugging Penelope, and the way Lady Danbury makes this extraordinary character, so Penelope does with Lady Whistledown. Observation is Lady Danbury’s thing. She sees a sharp, observant, quiet character in Penelope that’s intriguing. What’s going on in her head? What’s she thinking? Lady Danbury finds that delightful, and she sees a little bit of herself in that.

Do you think Lady Danbury suspects that Penelope is Lady Whistledown? 
That’s not such a priority in her head this season as it is for the queen. Lady Danbury feels that the queen is allowing Lady Whistledown to set the headlines, and she’s the queen. Lady Whistledown shouldn’t be running that narrative. Lady Danbury feels “we run the ton, not Lady Whistledown.” So to a degree, it’s there, she reads it and she knows about it. But her focus is elsewhere because she has agency over her actions. She doesn’t have agency over Whistledown in that same way. I mean, obviously, she’s intrigued to see what Whistledown has picked up on, because that’s more information to put into her files. 

What kind of plotting or strategizing might Lady Danbury be doing next season?
It’s sufficient to say that we’re staying within the structure we know and love — the Bridgerton kids and who’s going to marry whom — and that spine will run through all the seasons. We’re going to continue to have the same amount of fabulous sound and vision that we’ve seen so far. And Lady Danbury does what Lady Danbury does. She’s never going to step back from heading up the ton, seeing what’s going on and standing alongside her friend Lady Bridgerton and supporting her.

What was the most fun part of filming this season? 
Anything with Golda is fun to do because the characters do this back-and-forth jousting. Golda and I have never worked together before, but we’ve known each other from the circuit. And also lovely Hugh Sachs, who plays Brimsley, whom I’ve known forever as well. All that stuff is always gorgeous. The scene that was the most hilarious fun was the giggling scene with Ruth, because we’re terrible corpses anyway, so it was no great hardship to do that. 

We had a hilarious scene where we’re all out watching the fireworks. Remember that scene toward the end? There’s tons of us. Of course, inevitably, it’s tipping with rain, so we’re all schlepping out, the umbrellas are out, the umbrellas go down and it’s like, “Do it now! Do it fast! The rain’s cleared, it’s coming back any minute!” It’s the middle of the night. We were just hysterical by the end. It was like, “I don’t know who you are anymore. You’re just a bunch of soggy, giggling hysterics.” Again, it was, “I’m wet, I’m cold, it’s the middle of the night and the lights are flashing. It’s going to rain again in a minute, do your acting fast.” So hysteria [is] what happens. And it’s a very giggly cast, so it’s dangerous. Danger, danger, danger.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.