Bridgerton: Behind the scenes

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1:01I'm Alice McKee, and you're listening to In the Studio on the BBC World Service. As Netflix's Regency romp Bridgerton returns to our screens, I sat down with the showrunner and the cast to learn about the labour that goes into a love story.

1:25The show takes place in an alternate Regency-era London, following the Bridgerton family's romantic misadventures in noble society. Viscount Bridgerton, yes, are the young ladies of London truly so easily won by a pleasing smile and absolutely nothing more. So you find my smile pleasing. I find your opinion of yourself entirely too high. Your character is as deficient as your horsemanship. I shall bid you goodnight. I love banter, both as a viewer and a writer, and so I think two-hander scenes are my favourite kind of scenes to write and to watch. and a romantic two-hander is so fun to watch people flirt.

2:02I just love watching people flirt, I think. This is Jess Brownell, Bridgerton's showrunner. I asked her what romances she takes her inspiration from when she's writing the show. It's an interesting mix between Jane Austen adaptations and rom-coms from the early 2000s, I would say. My wife and I are just really obsessed with both the BBC version and the Joe Wright version adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and then Sense and Sensibility, Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet. We watch those movies as comfort over and over again. In vain, I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed.

2:41You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. I think Richard Curtis and Sleepless in Seattle, all those, you know, Nora Ephron movies, I go back to those constantly as well. And I think that pretty much sums up the sort of classic meets modern tone of our show. I don't even know him. I am having all of these fantasies about some man I have never even met who lives in Seattle. I just always loved stories about love and dating. And I remember being in film school and trying to write like thrillers or, you know, more plot based stories and just going, I just want to write about someone's dating life, really.

3:24And I can't believe that I get to do that on the show. Bridgerton is produced by Shondaland, the company founded by TV titan Shonda Rimes. They've been creating the television that gets people talking since 2005 with Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, and many more. Jess has been a part of Shondaland since its early days. So I was incredibly lucky. I got a job working for Betsy Beers, Shonda's, you know, right hand producing partner right out of college, basically. And I just did it all. I got the lunch, I got the coffee, I would upload the CDs, which dates us for sure. And I was also getting to do a lot of development because Shondaland back then was not, you know, the mega company that it is now.

4:14It was really just Shonda, her assistants, and Betsy and me reading writer's samples and reading, you know, IP. And so I got a real education in what makes a great Shondaland project. Being, what, 23 years old or whatever and having to have an opinion on something to Shonda Rhimes was terrifying. You know, what do I know? But I think actually knowing what your perspective is and knowing what your opinion is on art and on writing is so important for the development of a writer. You know, having like a unique POV more than being great at structure is so key.

5:06Bridgerton arrived on our screens in 2020 when we were all in need of a little escapism and connection based on a series of novels by Julia Quinn it made headlines with its colourblind casting and a decidedly unbuttoned up approach to sexuality rewriting the rules of costume drama for season one Chris Van Dusen was helming the show and Jess was part of the writers room We were still figuring out, obviously, what the show was. You know, Chris had written the pilot, but I think every writer's room, there's a process of figuring out the tone of the show. And we weren't sure, you know, how modern do we want to go?

5:43Do we want to stay absolutely true to the letter of the way people spoke? And, you know, we landed on something kind of in the middle. for me I had never written a period piece before and it was really nerve-wracking like normally I'm a quick writer and I just kind of bang out a first draft or force myself to bang out a first draft but I found myself writing really slowly the first time I wrote a scene for this show and really overthinking like how would they say this and eventually I got to the point where I I threw that all out and just decided to write a scene as I would if it were a modern show and then go back later and do a Regency Regency pass.

6:25And if I just had no idea how someone would say something, like what insult they would use or whatever, I would literally just put Regency Regency. I would come back to it at some point and figure it out. I tend to find scripts very difficult to read. There's something about the font that makes me fall asleep. But actually with this one I was like, oh, it just reads very easily. It's a very specific font as well that they use for screenplays. It's like they should switch it up, go for Comic Sans or something. Just a bit different. This is Luke Thompson, who plays Benedict, the most infamously rakish of the Bridgerton siblings.

7:05He's been part of the show since the beginning. It's actually a lovely show in the sense that you can sort of just abandon yourself to it a little bit. Like, I think it's just its own thing. Even the slight quirks of style, right, that from an English ear, sometimes you're like, oh, I'm not sure that really is Regis the English. But it's not, because it's Bridgerton. And Bridgerton has this very specific, it's its own, it's almost like its own language, as in it's sort of, 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.

7:40You can almost sometimes hear the modern line underneath the Regency in a very charming way. The one thing I think that people don't know is how zippy and fun the stage directions are on Bridgerton. I think they are consciously trying to emulate the feel of the show. And so they're quite sort of, how would I describe them? They're sort of gossipy and very modern. And again, it's just suffused with that thing that Bridgerton has, which is, yes, OK, it's borrowing an aesthetic from Regency. But fundamentally, it's also about something very modern and something very, you know, relatable and fun and light.

8:18And, you know, it's not a history lesson. I think we did want it to have a certain pop sensibility where, you know, you would hear music that you relate to and you would understand that, oh, OK, even if these people are actually listening to Mozart instead of Ariana Grande, like for them, that's a bop. you know so they're having a good time but we definitely spent some time in the writer's room going back and forth on that tone and there were versions that were more serious there were versions that were darker we were like oh are we really you know shedding light on how awful it was to be a woman then and then we were like this is powerful but it's maybe no fun and I think we ended up feeling like there needed to be a little bit more sugar with the medicine.

9:08Each season of Bridgerton focuses on a different romance and for series four that's Luke's character Benedict and the mysterious Lady in Silver. I asked Jess how she begins the process of writing a new season. I do always take a very very brief hiatus in between seasons sometimes only, you know, two or three weeks, but that's kind of my solo time with the book where I highlight, I make tons of notes, I've, you know, dog ear pages, and I'm just writing down, you know, what are, what's the heart of the story and what are the key set pieces. I do like a little bit of structure thinking at that stage, but it's really more about character and theme and what's exciting about the season, what's different, what sparkles and makes it separate from season one, season two, season three.

10:04Obviously for season four, that was all about the upstairs, downstairs.

10:12As we soon find out, the lady in silver is in fact a housemaid, Sophie. It's the first time the show has delved deeper into class dynamics. In Regency society, Sophie is hardly an appropriate match for the noble Mr. Bridgerton. The very first image that I had coming into the room was this idea of a staircase. I knew I wanted at some point a moment where they meet in the middle, between the upstairs world and the downstairs world. And I loved this idea that we would see Benedict ascending back up to his world and Sophie descending back down to hers and sharing a look up through the center of the staircase.

10:54That was really where it all started for me. As the showrunner, Jess writes on the show, but also oversees the writer's room, a team of scribes who work together to craft the series. So we are a Zoom room, but we do try to meet in person for at least the first two weeks of the room. I think it's good for our relationships with each other to have that time. And so we really try to max it out socially. At the beginning of season four, I can't remember what our team building was. I think it might have been just that I had everyone over to my house. And we played this game called Buffy with a Stick.

11:37My researcher had sent us information on. It's a very popular Regency game where one person stands in the center with their eyes closed and spins around with a stick. And everyone else is standing around in a circle. And you kind of have to guess by asking leading questions who you're pointing the stick at. I don't know. We were grasping at straws there, but it was so ridiculous that we ended up having a great time. What is your name? Why did you rescue me? It is rare to see someone beaming with joy at one of these things. It is positively spilling out of you. My favorite scene to write in season four was in my episode, the gazebo scene at the masquerade where Benedict and Sophie fall in love.

12:26You know, she's the lady in silver. That scene in particular, it was such a fun challenge because it's like you've got one scene to make these people fall in love with each other. Sure, it's love at first sight and there's something magical that can't be explained, but we needed to make sure that viewers understood from that one scene why these people are not going to stop thinking about each other for months and months. That's just the kind of challenge I absolutely love because you have to dig into character and think about what do these two people desperately need from each other? How can their damage speak to each other in the perfect way?

13:04But I will have you know I was doing rather well fending off the gentleman on my own. Does he not possess the qualities you seek? Qualities? I'm a suitor. Oh, I'm not looking for a husband. You are not? No. I imagine that is a really tricky thing to do. It's a real balance to play out a love story and make it feel earned and authentic when the two characters fall in love. And I guess you have to kind of make the audience fall in love along with the characters. And I was wondering how you do that. Yeah, I mean, I think it starts from the character work. We spend a ton of time thinking about, for each of the leads especially, what is this person's deepest, darkest fear?

13:52What is the mask this person shows to the world? Who is their true self? And you use all of that to then create either a foil or a mirror for them in their love interest. Benedict, who's really free spirited and, you know, has a real sense of play. And then Sophie, who is very serious. Well, she has a sense of play as well, but I think it's repressed. And in some ways, I think Benedict, you know, helps her bring it out. But she has a sense of responsibility that Benedict needs and wants. So they each want something from each other. And grounding it in that, I think, even if people aren't really conscious of those things, hopefully they can feel, oh yeah, these people are going to be good for each other.

14:40If they can get over their stuff, they're going to really make each other better people. Who are you? Where did you grow up? Here, in England. In the city or countryside? Between the two. Who are your parents? Mother and father. you know you have managed not to tell me a single thing about yourself is that something you do put all of the attention on others so that no one might see beneath your surface there is a lot of yearning this season i also think of this season as being a real fairy tale because you know it is the classic cinderella setup of a housemaid who falls for a nobleman you You know, and that's a trope that, you know, we all love and feel some sort of familiarity with, I think.

15:26Everyone was spellbound by the beauty of the unknown lady. The prince led her to the place of honor and asked her for the next dance. The characters have to travel through a real arc, more so maybe than in other films, because I think, you know, if you have a murder storyline, an action storyline, You can rely on those plot devices a little bit more to structure the show. But 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. We're a little bit technical about it. And every episode for the main couple, we're tracking where are they on that arc?

16:09Where are their feelings at? There's the falling in love. There's kind of the deepening into friendship. And we want to take our time at each of those stages and make sure that their relationship has, you know, depth as well as breadth and tension and longing and thirst. We monitor the thirst at all times and try to make sure the thirst is thirsty.

16:38We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about. It's called the dark web. Undercover in the furthest corners of the dark web, US special agents are on a mission to locate and rescue children from abuse. Move in now. From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, the darkest web follows their shocking investigations. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

17:32and takes centre stage in season four, I asked how he prepares to take the mantle of romantic lead. My mind was more on the problem of retrofitting it nicely to the character of Benedict, not sort of suddenly saying, oh, suddenly he's become just a totally different character to what we've seen before because now he's the romantic lead. Actually, the challenge of doing all those moments, like getting out of a lake with no clothes on, whatever it is, and for it to feel like Benedict and for it not to feel like, oh, right, he's a leading man now, so he has to do all these sort of romantic tropes, but actually, you know, do them and honour them because they're part of the genre, but also do them in Benedict's way because the beauty of the show is that it's different every time and it's a slightly different romantic hero every time.

18:22And if it was the same, it'd be awful. You know, I mean, we're actors, we're not delivery vans, so you get to sort of play with what you've already got. There's already material and people are already familiar with Benedict. In the same way, actually, that people are really familiar with the story of Cinderella. And so then the fun is to both meet that expectation and say, yeah, you think you know what this story is. And then suddenly be able to say, oh, but you haven't seen this character like this. Or, oh, but you didn't, this doesn't happen in Cinderella. So it's playing with expectations and surprising people.

18:53I think when you're new to already such an established cast and what feels like, you know, already a family, it can be a little bit daunting. But no, they were all just so, so lovely and generous. New to Bridgerton this season is Yerin Ha, who plays Sophie, the housemaid who sneaks into a ball disguised as a high society lady. Sophie and Benedict have a chance meeting on the dance floor, and as the orchestra play a classical cover of DJ Got's Fallen in Love by Usher, the pair instantly fall for each other. Later, they meet again, but Benedict has no idea Sophie is the lady in silver he's been yearning for all season.

19:34The first scene that we shot on set was the kite scene. I was so nervous on my car ride to set. But, you know, I already knew that Luke was, you know, such a lovely person, but I didn't know what he was like to work with. So I was hoping it was going to stay the same and luckily it did. And he was so, such a generous actor actually. And it was just a lot of fun. And I think it was the perfect scene because in that moment, Sophie, it's like the first time her walls come down as Sophie, the character in front of Benedict or Mr. Bridgerton, as she calls him. So yeah, it was like a really nice parallel because then it felt like I could let my walls down and I was able to be like, okay, it's just about playing now.

20:19It's just about having fun. And I remember like listening to Let's Go Fly a Kite from Mary Poppins, you know, that kind of whimsical childlike song that takes you back. So I just remember humming that as we were filming it. I'm guessing you weren't actually flying a kite and maybe it was someone just holding a long string. The movie magic. Yeah. They're just like on a fishing rod and like, you know, wheeling the kite ups and then yeah it's it's it's so funny what we have to block out when we're shooting things

20:52are kites not for children perhaps but how will i know if i've fixed this one if i do not fly it do you know where mrs crabtree is you worry far too much the kite scene was a really special day on set. It was the first time Yeren and Luke shot a scene together. And the fact that it was this scene that sums up their characters in so many ways that, you know, Benedict needs to learn to commit to something and which is fixing the kite. And Sophie needs to learn to embrace her sense of play. I loved seeing that come out and just, we were all just hanging out. It was a sunny day, you know just outside of London in the countryside and we were really living in the Bridgerton fantasy that day.

21:39And is there any sort of anxiety that you know is what we've written going to play out how we wanted it to on camera or in the scene? Yeah I you know of course chemistry is so important to this show until you get on set you know there's always this question of are we going to feel it but I think with two incredible actors like that it was you know It was a no-brainer. They were always going to kill it. Go on then. Oh no, I'm content to observe. I insist. I fixed it for you.

22:16Unless... What? You're concerned you might have a bit of fun. I think Bridgerton's really great at banter and scenes where it's just back and forth dialogue and it's a bit like a play. There's bits where you're allowed to just sort of talk to each other in a room. Well, in a way, those are the sort of scenes where you find out what your chemistry is, right? Because if you're toying with someone, and often it is two people sort of toying with the other. And actually, I think a lot of the Benedict and Sophie scenes, that's the main sort of dynamic. Those scenes, when they're very well written, as they were, they just release the dynamic, I guess, between the two people.

22:54So, yeah, no, they're a lot fun to play. I think we always think about chemistry on screen as this slightly mystical thing. do you think it comes from the script or the performance or is it a bit of both I think it comes from both but I think even like I find it interesting even the talk of like what chemistry is because it's a very sort of elusive thing chemistry and actually you know you can have chemistry with someone in real life and it's actually quite dead on screen you can have no chemistry with someone in real life and then actually feel really sparky on screen like there are no rules so it's not something really I think personally that you can really work towards I think you just have to go and discover what kind of chemistry you have because I think you have a certain kind of chemistry with everyone you meet and so I guess it's just a combination of absolutely the dialogue and just literally I know it sounds sort of quite obvious but just saying the lines to each other and playing around that builds it and that develops it as an actor I'm always more interested in that the things that sort of happen sort of like almost under the radar or that you're not necessarily aware of they're often the more interesting things that actors can do i think for me it's just being present as possible when i'm shooting and and being just a really good active listener because i do think at the core of chemistry is trust and feeling safe with someone I know for me at least as an actor that's where I feel like I can do my best work and focus on the things that I need to focus on rather than all this other fluff around so I can genuinely just focus on the work and I was able to do that with Luke.

24:41Romance as a genre is quite easy for people to dismiss. Why do you think that is? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think the easy response is that it is because it's considered a quote unquote women's world. And like, even when men like the show, they'll come up to me and say, oh, my wife loves the show. But then they've clearly been watching it with her too. And they want to talk about it. you know anytime there's a rom-com that gets any awards buzz it gets like rebranded like I remember Silver Linings Playbook got some Oscar buzz and it got like branded as a drama or as a you know dramatic comedy or something I'm like that's a rom-com that is a rom-com in every way it's a romance you know I think it partly is probably misogyny I think but I've always said I mean it's funny because you know the codes that supposedly people find silly or cheesy about romance they exist in every other genre they exist in you know horror and sci-fi and all of that like all of those if you you know put them under the microscope the the tropes are a bit silly it's just that it's that's how genre works

25:55i do genuinely feel like romance gives everyone a bit of an escape and a bit of hope and a bit of light that they too can find someone who sees them for who they are and that's all that I think humans want is to be seen and to be understood I think that's what romance does really well and it's just this warm feeling I think that humans crave at their core I think partly it's the idea that love is not just being realistic and love is also not just fantasy it's a bit of both but I I think romance genre is a nice reminder of how, you know, we all need a bit of magic when it comes to meeting people.

26:38There's a real extravagance to it and abandon to it. I think romance gives people the ability to dream and believe of more in their lives. You know, growing up, I grew up in a small town and spent a lot of time on my own, you know. and romance movies were everything to me. It was all I watched. You know, it wasn't just about like dreaming about having a crush. It was dreaming about a bigger life and the romance of life, you know, imagining that it could be big and adventurous. So I think 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.

27:29You've been listening to In The Studio with me, Alice McKee, on the BBC World Service.

27:56are on a mission to locate and rescue children from abuse. Moving in now. From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, the darkest web follows their shocking investigations. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.