Bridgerton's Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton Spill the Secrets Behind Season 3

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Some actors meet at a chemistry read or a joint audition, while others are introduced on the first day of filming. But when Nicola Coughlan met her Bridgerton co-star Luke Newton, it was on Instagram.

Though Coughlan and Newton portray one of Bridgerton’s most beloved couples, Penelope Featherington and Colin Bridgerton, the actors didn’t audition together. Rather, as soon as she was cast (and she was cast first), Coughlan read Romancing Mister Bridgerton, the fourth novel in Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series and the one that focuses on Colin and Penelope’s love story. “Immediately I wanted to know who Colin was,” she says. At first she heard the character would be played by Luke Thompson, so she looked him up online. Then, she says, “they were like, ‘No, no, it’s, like, a younger guy. He was in Disney,’ and I was like, ‘What?!’” Thompson was, in fact, cast as Benedict Bridgerton; Colin would be played by a different Luke—Luke Newton. So Coughlan picked up her phone again and sent him a message on Instagram.

Sliding into his DMs seemed to do the trick, and by the time the pair were filming, they had already begun building a strong friendship that would guide their working relationship. “We connected from day one,” Newton says of that first dance rehearsal. “She said to me, ‘You know I’m Whistledown?’ And I’m like, ‘What?!’” (Newton, unlike Coughlan, did not read ahead in Quinn’s novels.) They quickly bonded over gossip about the show and their hopes for their storyline. “It was weird to think, God, one day I might be doing this really intense romantic season with him,” Coughlan says. “It’s hard to fathom it, but at that point we didn’t know if that was ever going to happen.”

It’s difficult to comprehend now, with Bridgerton’s runaway success on Netflix, but before the series debuted, there was no guarantee the show would ever make it to Penelope and Colin’s romance. “We were only commissioned for one season out of the gate, so you have no idea if it will ever get to you,” Coughlan says. But to the delight of fans, the Shonda Rhimes–produced Regency romance arrived at Penelope and Colin’s love story—sooner than anyone expected.

Season three—which is split into two parts (four episodes drop this week; four more will premier in June)—focuses on Penelope and Colin’s relationship. Penelope, determined to find a husband and leave her mother’s home, struggles with potential suitors, and soon Colin volunteers to give her lessons in charm—before he realizes he’s falling for her. She is hiding the secret of being the anonymous Lady Whistledown, while Colin, who has returned from traveling around the world—complete with a glow-up—is figuring out his place in society as the third-eldest brother in an important family.

Unlike the first two installments of Bridgerton, which introduced new leads, the third season marks the first instance when the audience will have spent significant time with both stars. “It was nice to sit in those two roles for a couple of years and work and build on our friendship together,” Newton says. “It felt like it had to be that way. I know for other cast members that have come in, maybe they’ve met a couple of times before they shoot a romantic scene—or they shoot the first time they meet. It was really nice to already have that relationship with Nic, and know that we were going to get there at some point. It all aligns: It had to be that way; it had to be that we had history between us.”

Their characters going from friends to lovers was an easy shift. “I don’t want to say [we did] nothing. We worked hard together, but we didn’t have to do anything convoluted,” Coughlan says. “We had been holding back for two seasons! I was playing a character that was in love with him and he was meant not to notice. So for me, finally having the attention reciprocated between the characters meant they just unlocked something new for us. And thank god we’ve had that foundation of friendship and trust with one another, because I truly can’t imagine doing Bridgerton with someone else.”

Penelope and Colin’s romance draws on the classic friends-to-lovers structure, which is at the heart of many beloved romantic comedies (think: When Harry Met Sally, or 13 Going on 30); Bridgerton season three proves again why the trope works so well. In Quinn’s novels Penelope pines for Colin for more than a decade before he falls for her. In the Netflix adaptation, that timeline is (thankfully) compressed, with the chronology shifting for Colin’s story to take place earlier (namely, before Benedict’s).

Fans of Penelope and Colin (known online as the portmanteau ‘Polin’) are perhaps the most vocal in the entire Bridgerton fandom. Just scrolling through #Polin posts on TikTok, Tumblr, and X (formerly Twitter), or lurking in the Polin Bridgerton subreddit, the transparent amount of fan art, edits, memes, and excited speculation around what the season could contain has filled the long wait between seasons two and three. Coughlan and Newton could be co-presidents of the Polin fan club. In fact, they often send each other fan edits and TikToks they come across of their characters. “Nicola has got her finger on the pulse,” Newton says with a smile. “She’ll see a lot of the stuff and send me anything that’s funny.” (Coughlan is quick to add that Newton too sends her his share of posts.)

While filming, Coughlan in particular was mindful of what the Polin fandom was hoping to see in the season. “It’s a really careful balance of having so much love for [the fans] and wanting to do their love for the couple justice,” she says. “Once I get to set, then you just have to live as much in the moment for that character as you can, because you would be doing it a disservice trying to think of all of the things they want. You’re never going to please everybody.”

Still, there are certain fan-favorite scenes Coughlan knew had to be part of season three. For example, she says, “A lot of the fans are really desperate for Pen to address Colin as ‘Mister Bridgeton,’ because she never has—they always just call each other by their first names. That was something that I said to Jess [Brownell, the showrunner]. I said, ‘If that could be included at some point, I know they would love that.’” (Spoiler: It makes it in.) Including things just for the book fans is always going to be a “tricky balancing act,” she says, adding, “I do believe there are a lot of really special moments for the hardcore fans. I hope they feel seen and happy.”

Brownell was also aware of the audience’s expectations surrounding Penelope and Colin’s courtship, so she made sure beloved Polin moments and lines from Quinn's novel made it into this season, such as a fateful scene in a carriage where they declare their feelings for each other. “The carriage scene is a scene from the book that gets talked about a lot,” as does a reference to an intimate scene in front of a mirror, Brownell tells T&C. “We were very mindful that those were two moments that were really important to fans, and we wanted to find ways to pay homage.”

Though both Coughlin and Newton are predictably mum about their offscreen love lives—and do not address any speculation that has bubbled up online about a romance between them—they disagree about which romance storyline they’d like to experience in real life. “I actually don’t think friends-to-lovers is something that happens in my life,” Newton says. “If I meet someone I know immediately. There’s a difference between me and Colin.” So does he believe in love at first sight? “I think so,” he says, pondering. “I’ve felt that. I’ve met someone and been immediately infatuated with them. That’s something that’s more me than Colin.”

That said, Coughlan feels that friends-to-lovers is the healthiest way to go, because “you’ve skipped all of the posturing and all of the initial things you do when you meet someone—you try and pretend to have only nice underwear, or that you don’t sit on the couch and eat your dinner off your lap. Because they’ve been friends first, they go, ‘I know you.’ Deep, true, abiding love comes from when you love the bones of someone. You love them deeply in their entirety. That’s a thing that you get with friends-to-lovers, because you love them first as a friend.”

The kind of angst Bridgerton viewers are familiar with—the sexual tension that existed between Daphne and Simon in season one (their “I burn for you” vows) or Kate and Anthony in season two (“You are the bane of my existence and the object of all my desires”)—doesn’t exist in the same way with Colin and Penelope, though there are plenty of intense declarations of love.

“Because they’ve known each other a long time, that lends a little bit more familiarity and coziness to the season,” Brownell says. “It naturally felt like a slightly lighter tone, and we could lean into the rom-com element.” The season three writers room turned to romantic comedies with an underdog hero or heroine: Sixteen Candles, Can’t Buy Me Love, She’s All That, and Never Been Kissed all served as inspiration. Brownell would give specific references for certain Polin scenes, including the back-and-forth between Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal’s characters in Love Story. “There’s a pace to the banter where they're acting like they hate each other and they're annoyed at each other, but you can tell they really want each other. That was something I referenced quite a few times.” Plus, Brownell adds, “I always pull from Nora Ephron.”

Newton and Coughlan sought out their own rom-com inspirations as well. Notably, Newton turned to Paul Rudd’s “sensitive leading man” characters (he admires Rudd’s ability to balance honesty and comedy), while Coughlan says she’s been told her Penelope is reminiscent of Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary. Zellweger, she says, “wasn’t in my head, but to play her as this goof, as this awkward [girl]—I loved that. I revel in that stuff.” The foundation of her character, however, can be traced to none other than Princess Diana. “In season one, The Crown was about to come out with the first Lady Di season,” Coughlan says, explaining that Diana influenced Penelope a bit, especially that “look where she can kind of look up, but she can’t really.” Like Diana, she says, Penelope is “someone that feels like an outsider in high society.”

While Coughlan and Newton both take on the romantic lead roles easily, neither began their careers in jobs requiring them to profess their love in dramatic fashion or slow dance in grand ballrooms in period costume. Newton, 31, got his start in the theater world. “Both my aunties were West End performers,” he says, “so I used to go and see them onstage. I used to think, I just want to be up there.” He attended the London School of Musical Theater, and upon graduation he joined the cast of The Book of Mormon. A few years later he appeared in the Disney Channel UK series The Lodge, but Bridgerton is far and away his biggest role to date. Meanwhile, Coughlan, 37, who also attended drama school (at the Oxford School of Drama and Birmingham School of Acting), describes herself as a “comedy girlie”; she had her breakthrough pre-Bridgerton as the neurotic but lovable Clare on Derry Girls. Since then she’s made a point of diversifying her career, taking roles in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and the dark comedy Big Mood.

The actors’ onscreen chemistry in Bridgerton was bolstered by their clear adoration for each other, and their compatibility became even more evident as they filmed this latest slate of episodes. “Luke and I realized throughout this season that we’re a lot more similar than we would have previously thought,” Coughlan says. “We ended up spending so much more time together. We both are very sensitive people, and it can be a difficult thing to be a sensitive person. It can be misunderstood as weakness, but I don’t think it is weak. Sensitivity is a really important thing to have as an actor.” She adds, “I would think we’re both quite empathetic, also. If there’s someone acting badly, we both soak it in.”

They’re both “quite introverted” people who express themselves through performing, Coughlan notes. “Often I could see when he was drained from being around lots of people—in the ballroom scenes, when there are 200 extras and 30 actors and then 150 crew, that’s overstimulating to me, and it’s overstimulating to him. So we would look at each other and nod, and we’d go back to our trailers and just recharge the batteries. We both knew we needed that. It was quite nice to have someone who got that and felt the same. We didn’t have to explain it to one another.”

Their unspoken understanding of each other’s needs was critical not just for those large-scale cinematic moments but also for Penelope and Colin’s intimate scenes throughout the season. Before appearing on set, the two would go over the scenes together. As Coughlan says, “Having a united front was very important to us.” Over text they would trade their favorite sex scenes and onscreen kisses from movies and TV. “I really loved the one from Atonement, and it’s wild when you watch that back, how little you actually see and how much is in your imagination,” Coughlan says.

In approaching Penelope and Colin’s various intimate moments, Newton says, “There was never a thought of ‘Oh, let’s make this look really sexy’ or ‘Let’s make this a really romantic scene.’ It was just, ‘Let’s stay true to these characters.’” He adds that staying true to Colin and Penelope meant “making moments of it awkward and quirky. There’s humor in it, where they just laugh at each other and it’s so genuine. It really has a sense of showing their friendship from the start. Me and Nic wanted to honor that and keep that in the show.”

Coughlan and Newton leaned on each other in the marathon that was filming the season. They spent nearly a year together working on the eight episodes, in which they share most of their scenes. They began each day together, sitting side by side in the makeup trailer to discuss what was coming up, run lines, and watch silly videos together. Brownell says she was in awe of their work ethic. “They’re both very generous people and generous actors,” she says. “They’re people who show up to a scene and want to listen to what their scene partner needs.”

Their similar approach to their work helped set the tone for the season, particularly as they took on leadership roles. It's important for Coughlan, in all jobs she takes, to have what she calls a “culture of respect” on set. She explains: “The older I get, the more I realize nothing good for me happens in a toxic environment. I don’t like to get shouted at. I don’t like bullies on set. I don’t function in those spaces. Being around places that I feel respected—and respect goes around the whole crew, the whole cast, everyone—that’s deeply important for me.”

As the co-leads of season three, she and Newton worked to make sure that was the type of culture they fostered on Bridgerton, picking up where Jonathan Bailey, Simone Ashley, and Charithra Chandran left off in season two. Bailey, who plays Colin’s older brother, Anthony Bridgerton, was an important resource for Newton as he took on the mantle of leading man. “He was on call to me all the time, no matter what it was,” Newton says. Their fellow cast members, like Claudia Jessie, who plays Eloise, watched with love and pride as they took the lead. Jessie tells T&C watching them was the “best bit” of season three: “There’s a lot of pressure, and they both dealt with it beautifully.”

The not-so-secret theme of Bridgerton season three, then, is the power of friendship: Coughlan and Newton’s relationship offscreen was undeniably the key to unlocking Penelope and Colin’s friends-to-lovers romance. “The things that Penelope loves about Colin are, weirdly, the things I love about Luke: his kindness, what a good, caring person he is, his respect for women,” Coughlan says. Newton is similarly effusive in his praise for Coughlan: “You’re sat in the job for so long that you can’t ever imagine anyone else playing [Penelope]. It’s not even something that I can describe. She is that character to me.”

Bridgerton fans will no doubt love watching Penelope and Colin fall for each other and getting their happily ever after—mainly because their scenes have a different energy from the past two lead couples. “I quantify [Bridgerton] in my head as season one being about passion, season two being about longing, and season three being about romance,” Coughlan says. In Penelope and Colin’s love story, there are “those moments of beautiful levity—and levity doesn’t have to be being the butt of the joke.”

Ultimately, Coughlan says, “What I really adore about this season is in those intimate moments, there are moments where they’re laughing. It’s that gorgeous human connection when you can be truly silly with the person you love. That really touches my heart, and it was gorgeous to do that with my friend who I adore.”

Photographs by Mei Tao
Styled by MaryKate Boylan

Hair by Rebekah Forecast at the Wall Group. Makeup by Daniel Martin for Tatcha at the Wall Group. Grooming (Newton) by Melissa DeZarate at A Frame Agency. Nails by Kayo Higuchi for Chanel Le Vernis at Bryan Bantry. Tailoring by Olga Dudnik at Lars Nord.

In the top image: Nicola wears Mara Hoffman dress ($375); Bulgari earrings ($2,690); Marie-Hélène de Taillac choker ($6,500). Luke wears Dolce & Gabbana shirt ($4,595) and pants ($925); John Hardy necklace ($180).

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