Bridgerton fans were outraged when it was announced Regé-Jean Page wouldn’t return for the second season. But Page said that before Bridgerton aired, fans of the book series were mad he was playing a character originally written as white.


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Insider reports that Page told Variety that fans originally wanted someone with “icy blue” eyes to play Page’s character, Simon Basset, to match the book’s description. But Brazilian fans supported Page’s casting before everyone else caught on.

“I’m going to shout out [the book’s] Brazilian fans specifically, beacuse they had my back before anyone else did,” he said. “When everyone else was still passively aggressively getting all knotted up because I didn’t have blue eyes, the Brazilians were there for me.”

Indeed, Bridgerton‘s Brazilian fanbase is one of the most vocal and supportive; Insider reports that the series was the top Netflix series in Brazil, as well as 82 other countries around the world. The Bridgerton book series author Julia Quinn also toured Brazil in 2017, and the novel Because of Miss Bridgerton was also rated number one in Veja Magazine’s 2018 fiction list.

This, of course, isn’t the first time fans have raised a fuss over Black actors playing traditionally white characters. Recently, people have been in an uproar over Jodie Turner-Smith playing English Tudor queen Anne Boleyn in an upcoming UK miniseries.

“I did know it would be something that people felt very passionately about, either in a positive or a negative way, because Anne is a human in history who people feel very strongly about,” she said to Glamour UK. “More than anything, I wanted to tell the human story at the centre of all of this.”

Page decided to leave the top-rated Netflix series to take advantage of his exploding movie career. He can be seen next in films The Gray Man and Dungeons & Dragons.