About Verona
I’m Verona Rose. I’m an actor, comedian, writer, creator and presenter, and a lot of the work I make is shaped by where I come from, the different worlds I’ve found myself in and the many versions of myself I’ve had to figure out along the way.
I grew up as a working-class Black girl in Hampshire, an experience I’m incredibly grateful for. For my school life, I didn’t have any Black friends. That wasn’t something I walked around thinking about or feeling sorry for myself about. It was simply my normal.
Looking back, though, I can see how much that environment shaped me. I became very good at observing people, reading a room and adapting. Without really knowing I was doing it, I learned which parts of myself were easiest for other people to understand and how to make sure I wasn’t perceived through some of the stereotypes that could be attached to a young Black girl.
At the time, I didn’t think of any of that as performing. Then, at sixteen, I moved to London to attend the BRIT School.
Finding Out Who I Was
Moving to London changed everything.
For the first time in my life, I had Black friends. I was suddenly around people who shared cultural references, experiences and parts of an identity that I hadn’t really had reflected back at me (socially) growing up. You might imagine that I immediately felt like I had found where I belonged. Instead, I had a massive identity crisis. People would sometimes laugh at the way I spoke or tell me that I “didn’t sound Black”. Until then, my Hampshire accent had simply been my voice. I had never really questioned it. Suddenly, I became incredibly aware of how I sounded. I started deliberately changing the way I spoke. At the time I wasn’t even particularly drawn to the London accent, but I consciously stopped myself from pronouncing certain words the way I naturally would have growing up in Hampshire. I trained parts of my own accent out of myself because I was trying to work out where I fitted. What's interesting to me is; I had spent my childhood unconsciously adapting to one environment, and then I arrived in London and started adapting all over again. For a while, I genuinely didn’t know which version was me. And when you are sixteen, at a performing arts school, surrounded by incredibly talented and confident young people, not knowing who you are can be pretty destabilising. I lost a huge amount of confidence. The person who had arrived in London certain that she wanted to perform suddenly had to start rebuilding herself. Truthfully, I think I’m still building that confidence now.
Two Worlds
I wouldn’t change either experience.
Growing up in Hampshire gave me one way of seeing the world, (camping, fishing, river jumping). Coming of age in London gave me another. Being able to move between those two worlds has made me fascinated by identity, class, culture, belonging and perception. I’m interested in the person somebody presents to the world compared with the person underneath. I notice how people change depending on the room they’re in, what gets said, what doesn’t get said, who feels entitled to take up space and who has learned to make themselves smaller. Long before I became a professional performer, perhaps I had already been performing in ways I didn’t fully understand. Now I get to put all that observing somewhere useful.
Acting
Acting was my first love, and it remains at the heart of everything I do. My screen work has included roles in Netflix’s Top Boy, Dave’s Sneakerhead and the BBC comedy Fully Blown, alongside work across television, theatre and comedy. I love characters with contradictions. Women who are funny without necessarily knowing they are funny. People who are strong in one moment and completely vulnerable in the next. Characters who don’t fit neatly into one box. Theatre has always been important to me and will always be my first love. There is something about being in a room with an audience, telling a story together and knowing that particular performance will never exist in exactly the same way again. Whether I’m working on screen or stage, I’m always looking for the human being underneath the lines.
Comedy
Comedy has given me another way of making sense of people. I love character comedy because it lets me take something I’ve noticed in real life, turn the volume up on it and find the truth underneath the ridiculousness. Over the years I’ve created and performed a growing collection of original characters, as well as appearing on entertainment and comedy shows including 8 Out of 10 Cats, Celebrity Juice, Sorry I Didn’t Know and other television projects.
Presenting
Presenting allowed me to bring another part of myself to the screen. I hosted ITV2’s Secret Crush, fronting forty episodes of the dating series, and have worked across entertainment, factual entertainment and unscripted television. What I love about presenting is the unpredictability of real people. You can prepare as much as you like, but the best moments often come from actually listening, responding and being present enough to follow wherever the conversation goes. That ability to read a room that I developed growing up turned out to be quite useful after all.
Creating
Performing other peoples work isn’t enough. I wanted to create worlds and opportunities of my own. I created and starred in the BBC comedy Fully Blown and have continued to develop original scripted projects, characters, formats and comedy. My creative experience has also taken me behind the camera and into development spaces, including writers’ rooms and my time as a BBC Studios Factual Entertainment Creator in Residence. I’m particularly drawn to character-led stories about people who might not normally be placed at the centre of the conversation. My work often comes back to identity, class, community, belonging and the gap between how somebody is perceived and who they actually are. Sometimes those stories are funny. Sometimes they’re painful.
Building VRASP
Creating opportunities for other people has become just as important to me as creating opportunities for myself. That is a huge part of why I built VRASP, my acting studio and training project. I wanted to create the kind of room I believe actors need: somewhere you can take the work seriously without taking yourself too seriously. Somewhere you can make mistakes, try things, ask questions and grow. I teach from the perspective of somebody who is still working professionally myself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, after spending so much of my own life learning how to adapt to different rooms, I've ended up building one where I want other people to feel able to be themselves. VRASP now runs acting training and creative opportunities, and watching people become braver, more instinctive and more confident in their work has become one of the things I'm most proud of. [Visit VRASP → www.vrasp.co.uk]
Life Beyond the Work
My life outside the industry has shaped me just as much as my life within it. After being diagnosed with Hashimoto’s and autoimmune disease, I started looking much more closely at the relationship between food, stress and how I was feeling day to day. That eventually led me to AIP, the Autoimmune Protocol, alongside trying to live as calm and low-stress a life as realistically possible. For me, changing the way I ate made a huge difference. Over time, the symptoms I had been dealing with improved significantly, and it completely changed the way I thought about food and looking after myself. AIP also forced me to become much more creative in the kitchen. I learned to cook differently, and find ways of recreating foods I loved with a completely different set of ingredients. What started as something I did for my health became something I genuinely enjoy. These days, looking after myself means paying attention to what I eat and protecting my peace where I can. And underneath everything, I’m still very much the Hampshire girl. After spending so much of my life learning how to fit into different rooms, I think I’m increasingly interested in creating rooms of my own. I wish I could finish this with a beautifully neat sentence about finally discovering exactly who I am. I haven’t. I’m still figuring things out. I’m still growing in confidence. I’m still questioning myself. I’m still finding new parts of my voice, both literally and creatively. But I think I’m much less interested now in becoming whatever version of me a particular room might expect. Hampshire is part of me. London is part of me. The confident girl I was before I moved, the sixteen-year-old who suddenly questioned everything, the actor, the comedian, the writer, the presenter and the creator are all part of the same person. And these days, rather than trying to decide which version is the real one, I’m much more interested in seeing what happens when I let all of them speak.
Work With Me
I work across acting, comedy, presenting, writing and the development of original projects. For professional, creative and development enquiries, please get in touch through my Contact page.