How “Bridgerton” transformed Luke Newton into hunky 'pirate Colin' for season 3

"It was about Colin returning with a new sense of swagger," showrunner Jess Brownell tells EW.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Bridgerton brother in search of a wife must be in want of a glow-up.

Season 2 of the Netflix series gussied up Anthony (Jonathan Bailey), and for season 3, it's Colin's turn. However, showrunner Jess Brownell stresses that it was more about changing Colin's inner self before they ever discussed surface-level changes.

"We really focused on story and character, glow-up wise," she tells Entertainment Weekly. "It was definitely about Colin returning with a new sense of confidence, a new sense of swagger."

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That doesn't mean there weren't plenty of shifts on the wardrobe, hair, and make-up side. Star Luke Newton worked closely with those departments to help transform Colin into the romantic hero of the season.

"At the wrap party for season 2, [the head of our] hair and makeup department came up to me and said, 'Right, you're next. Grow your hair, grow the sideburns, whatever you think is right, and we'll see you for your first meeting in a few months,'" Newton recalls. "I did all that and I had these visions of long, windswept hair. I wanted the sideburns because I loved Anthony's in season 2. He had this clean cut, and it made me feel like he'd grown up a little bit."

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Newton was also heavily involved with perfecting Colin's more adult wardrobe. "I would go in and we wanted to create a wardrobe for Colin. Rather than a waistcoat and a coat for this scene and a pair of boots for this scene, it was like, 'Let's set a wardrobe, and we can pick and choose on the day for the scene what's appropriate, whether we have no tie, your shirt is open and loose or whether we need a tie."

In addition to building Colin's own capsule wardrobe, the costume department decided to give him a darker color palette this season to signify his growing maturity and his pivot away from the boyish blues of his youth.

"There weren't any specific asks," Brownell says of the directive from the writer's room to the creative departments. "The men's wardrobe team came with a vision. They came with a vision that was basically 'Pirate Colin,' as the internet has dubbed him. It was mostly about taking him out of the pastels and into a darker color palette that symbolized what we as writers had set up."

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For Newton, the different fits and styling made it easier for him to channel Colin's inner growth after traveling across Europe. "It really helped me rock up on set and feel like this brand-new version of this character," he explains. "I'd done all my prep in terms of what I think he'd been up to and the experiences that he had, and having a sense of a physical transformation when he's come back."

"I wanted him to feel like a man when he returned," he continues. "It's like when young lads go away for the summer, then they come back to school and they've suddenly got a beard and they've got this low voice and you're like, 'What happened to you?'"

Newton also took inspiration from a piece of dialogue in season 2. When Colin visits Marina Thompson (Ruby Barker), her words stick with him. "Something that really affected Colin was when Marina says, 'You are a boy,'" he elaborates. "We really played with that, and then, that led me to think, 'Okay, when he goes away, he really wants to grow up.' It's not just having this experience of being away. He wants to discover who he is and have a full adult experience."

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In some ways, that mirrored Newton's own experiences on Bridgerton. Having portrayed the more immature, supporting character version of Colin for the previous two seasons, he knew there would be infinitely more pressure stepping into the breeches of the romantic lead. Luckily, the shooting schedule helped him channel his own feelings into Colin.

"Throughout the first half of the season, he's discovering who he is back in society with this new experience that he's had," Newton says. "And I felt like that, as an actor leading the show for the first time, finding my feet. There [were] parallels between what I was experiencing as an actor and what my character is experiencing within the show. I didn't actually notice that until the last couple of episodes, and I felt like, 'Oh, I've really found my feet now.' And I was like, 'I think I'm meant to feel like that. It's what my character's feeling.' All those things do trickle into my day-to-day, despite how hard I try to not let them."

Season 3 of Bridgerton will air in two parts, with part 1 hitting Netflix on May 16 and part 2 following a month later on June 13.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.