In an exclusive interview with Black Girl Nerds, the Bridgerton star opens up about identity, representation, and why he leans all the way into love.
There is a particular kind of hunger that drives an actor to a role, and it is not the hunger of ambition, but it’s actually the hunger of absence. The recognition of something missing from the screen that you’ve always wanted to see. For Regé-Jean Page, that hunger is what brought him to You, Me & Tuscany, Universal Pictures’ sun-drenched romantic comedy arrives in theaters April 10, 2026, and it may be exactly what makes it matter.
In his exclusive conversation with Black Girl Nerds, Page didn’t mince words about his motivation. “I think there was a lot of opportunity in this role,” he said. “I think there were a lot of things in this script before I signed on that I hadn’t seen on screen that I wanted to see on screen.”
For an actor who built a swooning global fanbase playing the magnetic Duke of Hastings on Netflix’s Bridgerton, that statement carries real weight. This is a man who knows something about romantic leads and who also knows, intimately, what the genre so often gets wrong about who gets to inhabit them. Of course, we here at Black Girl Nerds, have known about Regé-Jean Page as a bright shining star early in his career interviewing him back in 2016 playing the role of Chicken George in the Will Packer TV miniseries Roots.
Page speaks about wanting to see Bailey’s character, Anna, “being embraced by this found family with no hesitation in this aspirational environment”. This is a deceptively simple ambition that, in the context of Hollywood’s long history of hedging, minimizing, or outright erasing Black women’s joy on screen, is actually radical. He wanted to see Anna find belonging without having to fight for permission to belong. He wanted to see her welcomed.
But Page’s vision for the film goes beyond Black female joy in isolation. He was equally invested in the complexity of his own character, Michael, a man who, as Page describes him, is “containing multitudes of cultures.” Michael is Italian. Michael is English. Michael is, as Page puts it, the only other Black character on screen alongside Anna — and that shared, unspoken understanding between two people navigating spaces that weren’t built for them becomes its own kind of intimacy.
Page speaks with particular pride about the work he did to make Michael’s Italian identity feel earned and embossed, not decorated. “I lean into the Italian to make sure it feels like a natural identity that he flips in and out of because it is as much part of him as his English identity,” he said. This wasn’t window dressing. Page committed to the linguistic and cultural texture of his character’s hyphenated selfhood so that audiences wouldn’t have to do the work of believing it — so it could simply be.
What Page articulates though, goes beyond chemistry or casting. It is a philosophy of representation, one that insists on aspirational Black storytelling shouldn’t require the genre to shrink or the characters to prove their worthiness of love, beauty, or adventure. He didn’t want any “unnecessary impediment,” he says. He wanted audiences to be able to “live that fantasy, that aspirational life through those characters.” No asterisks. No caveats. No explanation why they belong in Tuscany. They simply do.
You, Me & Tuscany opens in theaters April 10, 2026, from Universal Pictures