Francesca Amewudah-Rivers interview: Romeo & Juliet (Vogue)

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, 26, has always loved Shakespeare. “The language, the poetry, that vitality. It’s so rhythmic,” she says. As a 15-year-old member of the National Youth Theatre, she “used to queue up for £5 standing tickets at The Globe” and later, in 2021, played Othello in a NYT gender-flipped reimagining of the play, set in the ’90s rave era. The following year, she appeared in Macbeth as Lady Macduff, at The Globe itself.

And so when she landed the role of Juliet opposite Tom Holland’s Romeo, in director Jamie Lloyd’s hotly anticipated production of the Shakespeare tragedy, it must have been a pinch-me moment….