But how did the cast and crew create such an amazing, immersive world? “I don’t think there’s been anything easy about the show, but that’s of course what made it so rewarding,” creator and executive producer Chris Van Dusen told Shondaland. “This is the hardest job I’ve ever had, but that has made it the most satisfying.” Here’s all the insider info we found about how Bridgerton was filmed, and the cast members’ experiences making it.
Bridgerton Trivia and Facts
- Book series author Julia Quinn was starstruck about having her novels adapted by Shonda Rhimes for Netflix—and was totally OK with the changes that were made to enhance the Bridgerton world for TV. “I feel like I just had this wide-eyed Pollyanna thing,” she told OprahMag.com. “They just made something absolutely incredible that’s both the original and isn’t the original—it’s more. I can’t believe how fortunate I am.”
- Creating the cast’s elaborate costumes was a huge undertaking: According to Netflix, there were 232 costume-crew members, and 123 garments were made just for Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor). “I literally have a new dress for every scene,” Dynevor told Harper’s Bazaar. Which was her favorite? “There’s one in episode 8, it’s the first scene, when Daphne is getting her portrait done and she’s wearing this dark green, velvety dress, and it just hangs really beautifully,” she said. “And there’s something about it that really shows that she has become a woman and grown, and she’s no longer wearing petals and light blues and pastel.”
- The costume fitting process was very involved, as Nicola Coughlan (Penelope Featherington) told Netflix.“For my first costume fitting, my agent said, ‘They need you for four hours,’” she said. “Normally you just try something on and see if it fits, but because everything on Bridgerton was couture they had to get every single measurement right. They’d make an outline of your hand to get gloves made, they’d get shoes made just for you, everything was specially colored and if they didn’t have the right color, they would dye it.”
- There were garments we don’t even see, but that were totally necessary for the costumes. “I was wearing a half corset—thank God—so not the full-blown thing,” Dynevor told Glamour UK. “It’s weird, because your boobs look very different when they’re pushed up to your ears; corsets are even worse than a push-up bra, and I don’t really wear bras, so it was interesting to see my boobs in that condition!” Bridgerton’s corsets were created by corset maker Mr. Pearl. 5.Bridgerton had an “intimacy coordinator” who worked with the actors and helped choreograph all the sex scenes. “When we first met, we had the room with a bed in it, and she just came in basically with a bag of things—and it was yoga balls and yoga mats and bits of cutout things and just all these tools that you can sort of use,” Dynevor told Harper’s Bazaar. “It really was like shooting a stunt, it looked real, but we’ve got padding on…We felt super safe and it just meant that when we got on set, we already knew exactly what we’re doing. We’d blocked it all so specifically. I knew exactly where his hand was going to go at what point.” 6. The actors all had to learn the skills of the upper class of the time period, much like their characters would have. Depending on their role, they had to take classes in etiquette, horse riding, dancing, voice lessons or pistol training. The prep work for the show was intense, as Dynevor told Harper’s Bazaar. “And then, as my schedule came in: horse riding on Monday and piano lessons on Tuesday and etiquette training,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, okay. This is kind of crazy.’”
- For his part, Regé-Jean Page (Simon, Duke of Hastings) had to take boxing lessons.“It was really fun to do something so physical and exhausting and to get into visceral play with the other actors,” he told Netflix. “I got on really well with Martins Imhangbe, who plays Will the boxer, and we had a great time in those scenes. They were some of the most challenging days in terms of doing many takes that were as close to the real thing as you’re going to get, but we had some fantastic trainers. There’s a very specific type of feeling of reward when you walk away from work physically exhausted at the end of the day, and knowing that it’s going to look great.”
- Another major part of the show was the dancing. According to Netflix, there were 25 dances in eight balls, 3,600 bars of music danced, 38 dancers, and an hour and 15 minutes of choreography. Dance rehearsals were held at six dance studios around London.
- Coughlan, who is Irish, was happy about one dance that featured her character. “The dances were planned out before anyone was cast and I was thinking it was going to be a waltz or something like that, but it just so happened that the dance they had for Penelope was an Irish jig!” she told Netflix. “It was a total coincidence. It’s called The Siege of Ennis, and it’s a very famous dance that I’ve known since I was five years old.”
- The music in the show is 19th century-style string instrumentals of pop tunes from today. Dynevor loved one song in particular. “There’s an Ariana Grande song, there’s ’thank u, next’ playing instrumentally in the first episode, which just thrilled me to bits when I heard it,” Dynevor told Access Hollywood. “I was like, ‘This is perfect.’”
- Luke Newton didn’t have to learn how to sing for his performance as Colin Bridgerton in episode 8.“I come from a musical theater and singing background,” he told Netflix. “When the opportunity to be part of Bridgerton came up I never thought that I would be singing in the show, but I performed around the piano and it was so cool for me because I got to learn a completely different style of music that I’d never even listened to before. There was such a nice vibe on set and everyone was complimentary so it was great, but it was really terrifying!”
- The cast was musical off camera as well. “There are actually a lot of people in this cast who sing, and we were making up songs on set when we had an hour or two to chill,” Newton said. “We’re all ready to perform at any moment!”
- This wasn’t Shonda Rhimes’ first time working with singing legend Julie Andrews, who voices Lady Whistledown. Rhimes also wrote the screenplay for The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement. Dame Andrews, now 85, tells Parade that Whistledown is “a bit of a naughty woman.”
- Like their characters, Claudia Jessie (Eloise Bridgerton) and Coughlan are friends in real life. “Claudia Jessie and I were the first two people cast,” Coughlan told Netflix. “When I found out that Claudia was playing my best friend, I thought it was amazing because she is the most joyful person to work with.”
- Lady Violet Bridgerton might not have a favorite out of her eight children, but the actress who plays her, Ruth Gemmell, does. “I am drawn to Eloise,” she told Shondaland. “I admire her strength of character, her humor, and I am slightly envious of her outspokenness—direct but fair and always with charm.”
- Jonathan’s Bailey’s (Anthony Bridgerton) sideburns were real—but some of his costars’ were not. “They were homegrown!” he told Netflix. “About three weeks in, Luke Newton said to me, ‘They’re sticky and quite itchy, aren’t they?’ and I said, ‘What do you mean? No, these are real!’ He said, ‘You’re going to hate that.’ By the end, I was worried that when I took them off I wouldn’t be able to walk in a straight line. I’d be completely off balance.” 17.Bridgerton features 35 amazing locations around England, including the city of Bath largely standing in for London, and stately manors Wilton House, Castle Howard and Lancaster House. But the drawing rooms of the Bridgerton and Featherington houses were actually sets. In all, Netflix says there were 90 shoot days on location and 45 on studio.
- One of the locations used was near where Adjoa Andoh (Lady Danbury) spent her childhood. “I grew up in the Cotswolds, the rural southwest of England in the 1960s and ’70s,” she told Shondaland. “My brother and I rode horses all the time…We loved following Badminton Horse Trials every year. We filmed some of Bridgerton at Badminton House, actually, really close to where I grew up. I cried; I felt like I’d come full circle. I drove over to my dad’s after shooting there.”
- The Bridgertons have their own signature color: The pale hue of “Bridgerton Blue” was used as the basis for their drawing room set. It was inspired by the popular Wedgwood Blue, created by the fine china company during the period. Daphne Bridgerton also frequently wears blue.
- If you look carefully, you can spot bee motifs throughout the show, which is the symbol of the Bridgerton family (and actually, bees will become an important plot point later in the series). “The Bridgertons have a bee which appears on certain parts of their costumes,” the show’s head of hair and makeup, Marc Pilcher, told Netflix. “We have a few little hair decorations that reflect this as well and we pop them in now and again.” The Featheringtons have a symbol as well: butterflies.
- Many of the vibrant flowers that decorate the sets and locations are actually fake. “We were shooting over seven months and during winter, so fresh flowers were out of the question,” production designer Will Hughes-Jones told Shondaland. “Plus, we were ecologically minded and artificial flowers were eco-friendly, financially better and actually gave us the look we wanted. The wisteria on the exterior of the Bridgeton house—we put all that on, and then we reused it for the Queen’s garden party.”
- Historians believe the real Queen Charlotte, who was married to the “Mad King” George III, may have had some African ancestry as a descendant of Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a Black branch of the Portuguese Royal House. In Bridgerton, she is a Black woman played by Golda Rosheuvel.
- The Queen’s Pomeranians were a little difficult to work with on set. “I do very well with dogs, and these were very feisty so you had to calm them down a little bit, but they were excellent dogs,” Rosheuvel told Netflix. “They were as rowdy as the Queen sometimes, but I loved that. I think they were all female, bar one. It’s a very female-driven show.”
- The Queen’s elaborate wigs would have been going out of fashion at the time—and were expensive. “You had to pay a tax if you wanted to wear powder in your hair or in your wigs,” Pilcher told Netflix. “It was about thirty pounds a year, which was a lot of money back then, so people decided to discard their wigs.” But for wealthy Queen Charlotte, this was no matter. “She’s got nothing else to do,” he says. “She’s waiting for her husband to die and she’s quite bored. It took us a lot of time, but [creating the wigs] was great and a really creative thing to do.”
- Now let’s get to the question everyone wants to know: Are Page and Dynevor dating in real life? They say no—sort of. “I think that everything you need to know is on camera,” Page told Access Hollywood during their joint virtual interview. “All of the sparks that flew came off of the beautiful scripts that we were handed and so I think that the sparky words, scripts and material are more than enough.” Joking that they could really be in the same room during the interview with the separate screens as a ruse, Page said, “We’re playing footsie under here.” Hm…come to think of it, he never really answered the question. Can’t get enough Bridgerton? Channel your inner Lady Whistledown with Regency slang and phrases from the show.
