A week until the release of Bridgerton’s Series 4 Part 2, fans are desperate to know if romance will flourish in this twist on the Cinderella story
As cliffhangers go, Bridgerton fans have been left dangling above a precipice since housemaid Sophie rejected Benedict’s proposal to be his mistress at the end of Season 4 Part 1.
Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha) and Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson) fell in love when they met on the dancefloor, as the orchestra played a classical cover of Usher’s DJ Got Us Falling in Love, after she sneaked into a ball disguised as a high society lady, wearing a stunning silver dress.
Now there’s just one week to go until Netflix releases Season 4 Part 2 on February 26, when fans will find out if this take on Cinderella gets a fairy tale ending. But, before that, we take a look behind the scenes with actors Luke and Yerin, together with showrunner Jess Brownell, who wrote the season, to find out how this heady mix of romance and scandal — with a Regency twist – is created.
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Famed for its steamy moments and sexual tension, Jess says: “When you have a romance, because you don’t have a ton of other plot elements, other than the relationship, you have to focus on how they feel. There’s the falling in love. There’s the kind of deepening into friendship. We want to take our time at each of those stages and make sure the relationship has depth and breadth and tension and longing and thirst”.
She explained: “We monitor the thirst at all times and make sure the thirst is thirsty! Chemistry is so important to this show. I think until you get on set there is always this…are we going to feel it? But I think with two incredible actors like that [Luke and Yerin] it was a no brainer. They were always going to kill it”.
Based on the Julia Quinn book An Offer From A Gentleman, Bridgerton’s Series 4 is very much about the upstairs – downstairs class divide of the Regency era. This made Benedict confident that, as a nobleman, offering the position of mistress to a housemaid was a good prospect — and not an insult.
While this is true to the class divide of the Regency era, there is nothing very strict about Bridgerton’s period references – with fun being more important to the script than any adherence to historical context. Jess, who cites influences like Sleepless in Seattle and the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, says: “I think we did want it [Bridgerton] to have a certain pop sensibility… If these people are actually listening to Mozart rather than Ariana Grande, to them, that’s a bop. So, they’re having a good time”.
As for portraying the inequality between men and women in Regency England, she says: “There were versions [of the script] that were darker. You know, “are we really shedding light on how awful it was to be a woman then?”. Then we’d be [like] “this is powerful, but it’s no fun” and we’d end up feeling there needed to be a little more sugar with the medicine!”.
For season four’s leading man, Luke Thompson, the fun element of Bridgerton scripts comes as a huge relief. He confesses: “I tend to find scripts are very difficult to read. There’s something about the font that makes me fall asleep”. Except, of course, for Bridgerton scripts. He continues: “Bridgerton is almost like its own language. It has a flavour of high society English about it, but it’s also very American. And that’s kind of the fun of the writing and of the show. You can sometimes almost hear the modern line underneath the Regency in a very charming way”.
Even the stage directions are “zippy and fun,” according to Luke, who adds: “They are quite kind of gossipy and very modern. And again it’s just suffused with that thing that Bridgerton has and that’s yes, ok, it’s borrowing an aesthetic from Regency, but also, fundamentally, it’s about something very modern and something very relatable and fun and light. And, you know, it’s not a history lesson”.
The show’s scant regard to historical accuracy has certainly not damaged its appeal. Its debut season reached 82 million households in the first 28 days. And season 4 part 1 had 39.7 million views within its first four days — showing its magic is still not waning. But producer Shondaland has been making ratings-grabbing shows since 2005, with successes including Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder.
Jess Brownell has been part of the hitmaking machine since 2008, when she remembers fetching lunch, making tea and uploading CDs. Being showrunner on Bridgerton, as a lover of romcoms and romance, is a dream come true for her — although she is frustrated when people get sniffy about the genre. She says: “Any time there’s a romcom that gets any awards buzz it gets rebranded. I remember Silver Linings Playbook got some Oscars buzz and it got rebranded as a “drama” or as a “dramatic comedy” or something and, I’m like “It’s a romcom!””.
Luke agrees that some people look down on romance as a genre. He says: “I think it’s partly misogyny. But it’s silly because the codes that people find silly or cheesy about romance, they exist in every other genre. They exist in horror and sci-fi — all of those, if you put them under the microscope, the tropes are a bit silly. That’s just how genre works”.
Neither he, nor Yerin Ha, nor Julia have any problem with romance — far from it. Luke continues: “I think the romance genre is a nice reminder of how we all need a bit of magic when it comes to meeting people. There’s a real extravagance to it. There’s an abandon to it”. Yerin adds: “I do genuinely feel that romance gives everyone a bit of escape and a bit of hope and a bit of light – that everyone sees them for who they are. That’s all humans want, I think, is to be seen and to be understood. I think that’s what romance does really well at – creating this warm feeling, I think, that humans crave at their core”.
For Jess, who confesses that, even in film school, she “just wanted to write about someone’s dating life,” romance is the ultimate genre. She says: “I think romance gives people the ability to dream and believe in more in their lives. The romance of life. If romance inspires people to find themselves, to be their truer selves to own who they are – which is always the theme at the heart of every season of Bridgerton, I think, then that’s a beautiful thing”.
These interviews can be heard in full on In the Studio, Bridgerton:Behind the scenes on the World Service, available on BBC Sounds.
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