Harmony Rose Bremner: “I hold so many interweaving patriotisms in my heart”
The actor on assimilating to the realm of whiteness, not having a mixed guidebook and Ratatouille
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to actor Harmony Rose Bremner, who is of mixed Jamaican and Scottish heritage. Harmony most recently appeared in Prime Video series Fifteen Love and is now on stage in Protest, where she plays a character whose eyes are being opened to the injustices of the world. I loved Harmony’s open conversation and how she shared her vulnerabilities, and can’t wait for you to read her story below.
How do you define your background?
My dad is from Scotland and my mum is Jamaican. I always say mixed-race because I am a mix of races.
I have a weird relationship to identity from the offset – I was born in London, then we moved to Edinburgh when I was around one. I grew up there until I left for drama school at 17. When I got to London, I had this whole new perspective of the world and experience of belonging in a way that was very different from the place that was meant to be home.
There’s so many interweaving patriotisms that I hold in my heart from all the places I’m from, yet they all feel like they belong to those people while I’m dancing around in the middle of it all.
Growing up I was oblivious, I just believed I was like everybody else. It didn’t compute that people would see me differently until my mum would tell me “you’re not the same.” As a kid, the concept of racism is so wild, unjust and feels so pointless. I thought “surely people aren’t really like that, they must be stupid if they are.”
Did you ever speak to your family explicitly about being mixed?
It doesn’t feel like there was just one conversation about it, my parents were like “your dad’s white, I’m Black, you’re mixed-race.” It was a running ‘this is how it is’ rather than a thing that felt like an obstacle.
My mum said to me “even though you’re mixed race and you’re equally of white and Black heritage, you’re never going to be seen as white.” I was like “cool, that’s great!” I didn’t realise until I saw how the wider world was that that means something.
Do you feel like your sense of self has shifted and changed over time?
Identity has been such a conundrum for me all my life. Here at 24, I’m nowhere close to the point of having a handle on it.
We’re all who we are on the inside and are defined by how we want to define ourselves, but we’re also defined a lot through everybody else. Everybody has different opinions of us and one person is going to see me completely differently to another person. I can feel one way on the inside and it's gonna have no control over how all these other people are gonna see me.
I’m just learning as I go. I spent a long time when I was young subconsciously trying to fit in. I think because I was in a very white space, I’d say things like “I wish I had long hair” or “...eyes like this person” or “...a body shaped like this person,” constantly trying to fit in. It was only moving away and getting a bit older that I realised that I was trying to assimilate to the realm of whiteness.
Then I’d be in other spaces in London with Black, mixed and non-white people and I thought “I want to fit in here too!” But I’d spent my whole life trying to fit in in that other place, so I didn’t know how to do it here.
It’s a confusing experience. It’s nice to know that so many other people who are mixed have that experience of not really knowing where to place yourself. There’s no guidebook or template.
How has your mixed heritage influenced your work? It’s been quite a key element of some characters.
My experiences have all been very special connections that I’ve made with the script and the cast and the characters themselves, because it’s on that deeper level. It's really nice to see that experience written into a script because acting, for me, is a reflection of life. People can see themselves and not feel alone. That somebody is invested enough in mixed stories to put them on screen or stage… you can’t be alone if it’s up there!
It’s also a vital part of your current role in Protest.
For this character, it’s very important to the story that this character is written as mixed. I love her and this play so much. It’s very deep and personal.
The character is an 11-year-old in her own small world that you get sheltered into by the way you’ve been brought up. Then that segways into the wider world and you see the bad things that we know as adults. Protest is through the lens of somebody discovering the injustices of the world for the first time. My character is having her world turned on its head.
When I read the script for the first time, I was like “she’s Jamaican and Scottish, that’s me!” It was so insightful and emotionally intelligent to how you feel at that age. It really takes me back to having a very similar experience of the outside world slapping me in the face and learning how to deal with that.
In rehearsals, we’ve been saying this phrase, ‘hurt and hope.’ It’s a nice way of armouring yourself against the outside world. Realising that this is how the world is is quite shit, but there are also so many amazing beautiful things about being mixed-race – or Black, or non-white, or white. There’s so many gifts.
On that note, what’s one of the best things about being mixed-race for you?
I remember visiting my dad one day when I was really down, struggling with this sense of home, belonging and where I place myself. My dad encouraged me to not think about what I don’t have, but to think about what I do have, which is a unique perspective on the world and the many, many different lenses I can view the world through. As much as it doesn’t feel fully rooted into any of these different spaces, I still get the gift of being able to be in them.
What do you think of the stereotypes around mixedness?
I guess in people's attempt to understand or decide where they can place people in their minds, it is a lot easier to generalise and stereotype so it can all appear a bit simpler. But every single mixed experience is different, which is why I think it’s difficult to have one right word or term or one right way to be.
I spent so long thinking about what everybody else thought that it really crumbled me. Now, I really try to hold on to how I feel on the inside rather than how I appear. It’s so exhausting to be constantly walking around mind-reading people. You’ve got this suit of armour on all day.
Can you sum up your mixed experience in one word?
Rich. Sometimes you eat something and it’s really rich and you’re like “that’s a bit intense for me, I need to slow down. But sometimes you eat something so flavourful and have a flavour sensation, like when Ratatouille eats the strawberry and the cheese at the same time. It’s good and bad and amazing and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Catch Harmony in Protest, playing around the UK throughout February and March. Next week I’ll be speaking to May December actress Elizabeth Yu. Subscribe to get Mixed Messages in your inbox on Monday.
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Mixed Messages is a weekly exploration of the mixed-race experience, from me, Isabella Silvers. My mom is Punjabi (by way of East Africa) and my dad is white British, but finding my place between these two cultures hasn’t always been easy. That’s why I started Mixed Messages, where each week I’ll speak to a prominent mixed voice to delve into what it really feels like to be mixed.