Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Vogue Germany. Read the translated and edited version below.
“My German isn’t good, but I love speaking German with you,” says Vogue Germany’s May 2026 cover star Simone Ashley, speaking the language with startling clarity and smiling into her Zoom camera. It quickly transpires that the actor is something of a Germanophile—she even met her best friend, Pia, in Munich.
A few weeks after the magazine’s cover shoot in London, Ashley is hopping on a video call wearing a gray hoodie—her sporty look is because she’s going straight to strength training after our call, in order to prepare for the Brooklyn Half Marathon, which she is running in late April.
It’s a big month for the actor and musician: On April 10, she released her debut EP, Songs I Wrote in New York, and on April 20, she attended the world premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2, in which she stars as Amari, an assistant to Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly.
It was Ashley’s role as Olivia Hanan in the popular Netflix series Sex Education that first put her on the map—and led to her big break as Kate Sharma in Bridgerton, starring alongside actor Jonathan Bailey. Her performance in Bridgerton sent Ashley’s career stratospheric, earning her a place on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and Time 100 Next, in addition to numerous award nominations.
But today, at 31, Ashley seems to be embarking on a new chapter—and below, she tells Vogue Germany all about it.
Vogue Germany: You can’t share much about your role yet, but can you tell us what it was like to work with all those film legends?
Simone Ashley: I was mainly with Meryl and Stanley. We shot the first half on the streets of Manhattan, which was crazy. We shot in the studios for the Runway offices, and then we went to Milan. I learned so much from just observing how everyone worked. They’re just masters of their craft; they’ve been doing this for years and years and years.
This movie changed my life in the sense that I had one of the best summers of my life, working with David [Frankel, the director] and Aline Brosh McKenna [the producer and screenwriter] and all the producers and the crew, and being in New York. It also felt like a bit of a masterclass in acting, just watching all of them, how they conveyed their characters, and how they blended into the world of The Devil Wears Prada. Because it is a very specific kind of world—fashion in New York City, and that kind of hyper-real, but ever-so subtle and chic, tonality.
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