Bridgerton actress finds it 'amazing' that the show disregards her disability

In her tailored purple uniform, "your skin but better" makeup and functional up-do, Gracie McGonnigle is delighted to play the young maid Hazel in season four ofBridgerton.

To the 23-year-old "period drama girl", it's literally a dream come true, and an "amazing thing" that the Netflix show makes no mention of the fact that she has no left hand.

"Putting someone like me on Bridgerton, it just means that people are getting connected to me virtually through the screen. Hopefully, in the back of their minds, they're subconsciously getting to know disabled people out in the wild, just going about their business," she tells RNZ's Saturday Morning.

To avoid stigma and judgment, a lot of people living with minor disabilities try to hide them, McGonnigle says.

"They would much rather people got to know them and just treated them like a normal human being with a job and a life and lots of other things."

Growing up, McGonnigle says she didn't really realise her congenital limb deficiency, which is "not hugely" debilitating, was a disability at all because people around her seemed to view that as an unhelpful or even "dirty" word.

From her perspective now, it's "not useful" to try and conceal the fact that she needs help with some things, though, and as "disability" is a medical term, she's comfortable using it.

After leaving school at 16 to study acting at the BRIT theatre school, though, McGonnigle endured "a lot of chat about castability" and ended up learning her craft "on the job" via Christmas pantomimes.

As an "avid fan" of Bridgerton, when the young actor received an unnamed script full of aliases and watermarks, she recognised the style of the Netflix show. But after filming an audition with a friend, she didn't expect to never hear anything further.

About a month later, though, when she was coming to the end of a theatre show and contemplating a return to bar work, McGonnigle's agent delivered the news that she'd been cast as Hazel - a maid in Bridgerton's downstairs crew of servants who appear in Season 4.

"Genuinely, I was shaking… I just knew it would be pretty life-changing for me."

As someone who yearns for a phone-free life, McGonnigle loves the escapism of watching a show she describes as "a dream version of what London might have looked like in the Regency period."

Although the period drama genre is not known for being very inclusive, with a racially diverse upper class, and now in Season 4, a group of servants and a cast member with a disability, Bridgerton definitely has that "USP" (unique selling point), she says.

Others living with congenital limb deficiency have certainly taken notice of Hazel's appearance, McGonnigle says.

Since Season 4 of Bridgerton debuted on 29 January, her phone has "blown up" with messages, including one from a Paralympic swimmer saying, "I didn't know we could do acting!"

"The lack of representation really is pretty shocking when people are like, 'Oh, wow, I'd never even considered that acting could be a career for me.

"I'm like, 'Well, get into acting. Hopefully, if there's a few more of us, you might see us around a little bit more'."

In the future, McGonnigle says it would be really cool to get an acting project where she could wear the bionic arm she was gifted a few years ago - perhaps in the superhero world because it does feel "very futuristic" to wear.

"I just love having the choice to put it on, to match it with my outfits as well. It makes me feel like a sort of bionic Barbie."